3 different family members have given me tomatos and they keep spoiling
3 different family members have given me tomatos and they keep spoiling
Lost of sauce! After that you can store them for up to 1 year. Useful for many pasta sauces.
translate this post to see the specific process to do https://www.lacucinaitaliana.it/tutorial/i-consigli/salsa-pomodoro-ricetta-nonna-originale/
Tomato sauce. Freeze into cubes using and ice tray. Stays good for a very long time, she you can defrost just what you want to use.
Confit a bunch. Make some garlic confit while you're at it. That stuff, especially on some decent bread, is ridiculous.
Make buttloads of "base sauce" (you can then easily turn it into pizza/pasta sauce or whatever just by adding things) or just passata.
Soups, stews, curries.
Good tomatoes work pretty well as a "sandwich topping", bit of mayo, salt and pepper is all you need.
I hate to send anyone to That Other Place, but the/r/legaladvice salsa is very good, and you can can it if you add a bit of lemon juice.
When I have a large crop, if I have time, I'll make marinara and freeze it in like one-cup containers.
If the crop is too large or I don't have time, I'll go through, remove the stems, and cut out any small bad bits (tomatoes with large bad bits will get used in other ways). I'll get out the largest pot I own and put all the tomatoes in it, using a potato masher to break them all open and get them in the pot. Then I put it on medium heat, stirring occasionally. The water will start to evaporate. About 1/2 of the way down, I take it off the stove and run everything through a colander, putting the skins, the part where the stems attach, and most of the seeds aside. (You can compost them or use them to make soup stock (or you can freeze them along with other veggie scraps if you can't make stock at the moment)).
Then I return the tomatoes to the stove, stirring occasionally. Toward the end, you finally actually start having to pay attention and stir more frequently, but eventually they'll take on the thick consistency of tomato paste - stop the cooking then. Let it cool down, then spread them into ice cube trays and put them in the freezer. Once frozen, move the cubes into a freezer Ziploc.
You can use the cubes as needed: use as-is for tomato paste, or add varying amounts of water for tomato sauce or puree, then use the tomato paste/puree/sauce as an ingredient, or to make marinara, pizza sauce, tomato soup, lasagna, etc, etc.
The nice thing with the boiling-down thing is that you can boil down a tall stockpot of tomatoes into a couple ice trays of tomato paste - it's incredibly space-efficient.
For the smaller ones, tomato confit (baking in a bath of oil) is really good, can be used as a topping for pizza, put on toast, put on foccacia if you make that, or can just be eaten as a snack. I usually throw a head of peeled garlic in there, and then I have nicely flavored oil that I can keep as well.
Assuming you’re working with just freezer space rather than access to home canning:
tomatoes freeze just fine for use in cooking later. Remove the skins by blanching first if you’re not planning on blending the tomatoes entirely. I find freezing diced tomatoes easier than whole bc I’m generally throwing them in soup or chili but whole tomatoes will also freeze well, they just take up a little more room
cherry tomatoes freeze fine whole and can make a fantastic very quick pasta sauce. You can also make it fresh, no peeling required
pasta sauce/pizza sauce freeze really well
salsa surprisingly freezes well if you’re making a cooked recipe, just don’t expect pica de gallo coming out the freezer to taste like fresh
tomato jam would be a great use of some of the cherries and also freezes well. I’m actually making some today from cherry tomatoes that I froze last month will find a link to the recipe if you’re interested
Basically, just get those tomatoes processed in the freezer asap and you’ll be using them all wint