Last week we harvested a total of 85 pounds of tomatoes from the greenhouse. We ended up sharing 42 pounds with friends, family and neighbors, leaving us with a more manageable 43 pounds to process and preserve. We had a busy schedule, so I wanted to get them put up as quickly and easily as possible. We ended up electing to make tomato sauce with them.
Here are the last 43 pounds ready to become delicious tomato sauce.
A few years ago we bought an attachment for our meat grinder that is a juicer. It was a terrific investment considering we already had the grinder. It has SIGNIFICANTLY reduced our labor and time in juicing up tomatoes for making juice or thickening up for a sauce.
Here is our setup and a nearly full 16 quart pot of tomato juice ready to simmered and thickened up for sauce.
Some lessons we learned with the juicer attachment, run the skins through several times until the skins are almost dry. Running them through just once leaves a lot of juice in them. Once we had a full pot of juice we moved it to the stove and allowed it to simmer for 24 hours. The house smelled amazing! When it was done we had lost 1/3rd of the volume and it had thickened up to a nice sauce consistency. We ended up with 8 quarts of the the tomato sauce to add to our pantry.
Here you can see our grinder setup running.
