Making Tomato Sauce with a Crate of Tomatoes

I spent yesterday turning a $20 crate of Ontario tomatoes into 18 jars of sauce. Since all the jars were reused, that's cheaper than what you might buy at most supermarkets, if you don't count the labour or the gas-stove energy. As for the labour, I figure it's a bargain. Let loose on a Saturday, I might well have blown $25 on a movie and popcorn... or much, much worse. The image above shows the very crowded counter where I was blanching tomatoes in the blue pot, then transfering them to the blue colander before tumbling them into the overcrowded sink.

The cooled tomatoes went into silver bowl number one; then I skinned them and seeded them over the strainer in silver bowl number two, so I wouldn't lose any of the good juice. The final step was to run them through an 1897-vintage hand-cranked iron grinder, my big concession to mechanization. (Of course, I'm really jealous of the folks at Well Preserved, with their motorized crusher/seeder/skinner. Apparently they can do a bushel of tomatoes in half an hour; it took me a solid five hours to do 1 1/9 bushels.)

I have one pot that's big enough for the whole shooting match (just!); I think it holds 18 litres or 10 gallons. In the end, I got 18 jars of sauce measuring between 500 and 1,500 mL, so that just about works out. In retrospect, I would do this again, but I'd start much earlier in the day. It was 3:30 in the morning by the time I was able to turn off the canner, since the biggest jars take almost an hour to process.

I would also take the advice of Well Preserved and wear gloves; today my hands feel the way they do if you work with plaster – not sore, exactly, but a bit raw and dry (I noticed partway through the process that they were looking purplish-white and extremely wrinkly.) However, with what I made before, we can now open a jar of nice local tomato sauce every two weeks until the end of April. Well worth it.