Yardening

The last tomato post was about late season green tomato harvests and whether it was worth finding a sunny spot for them to ripen in. So this is the next step, processing of ripened tomatoes. I made marinara and the texture wasn’t quite right, nor was the flavor as intensely tomato-y as we get from mid season, OMG-it’s-too-hot-for-this-mess tomatoes. So now the question is, what do I do with these not-the-most-awesome flavor tomatoes? Waste not, want not, right?

After a relatively short decision making sesh that leaned heavily on the fact that I did not want to leave the house, I decided I would make tomato paste. I’ve never done this, but it fits right in with the not leaving the house bit since it takes more than 3 HOURS to make. Yikes. But then I’d have tomato juice and tomato paste, so maybe worth the effort?

After I processed the tomatoes and got almost twice what I normally process when I can marinara, and drained off as much tomato juice as I could, I decided to cook it down on the stove to remove some of the liquid in hopes of shortening the time in the oven. This is time intensive, because you have to stir it regularly if you don’t want it to stick to the bottom of your pot. After about an hour, I spread what was left on baking sheets.

It took a loooooong time to cook down in the oven. Way too long. Like, a total of 5 hours. I actually turned off the stove when I went to bed and turned it back on in the morning to finish the process. This was ok germ wise because I did not can the paste and wasn’t worried about what would be introduced if it got to room temperature. I froze it in silicon ice trays for easy dispersal.

How’s the flavor? Pretty freaking awesome, actually. I can only imagine how amazing it would be with mid summer tomatoes. Final verdict? 8 out of ten, with points lost for lengthy cooking time. All told, I’ll probably do this again next year.