10/24/2026
Getting my homegrown tomato sauce dialed in
I've gone through nearly every permutation of tomato canning and processing for my yearly crop you can imagine. Canned whole, canned diced, canned sauce, blanched/shocked/peeled, frozen and peeled.
In doing so, I've learned what things aren't worth doing (canning whole or diced, peeling via blanching and shocking). I've learned what things are worth doing (making sauce and accumulating ripe tomatoes in the freezer for later processing at my convenience).
This year felt like the first one where the pieces all clicked into place. The majority of that is due to my new food mill and learning how to work with it. It does exactly what I wanted: tomatoes in one end, juice out one side and the waste (seeds, skins, cores) out another. This gadget (plus freezing my tomatoes) has turned me into a sauce machine!
As my San Marzanos come ripe, I rinse and freeze them. San Marzano is an indeterminate tomato, as well as a vigorous producer, so there's no season, no harvest. You collect and collect, the plants make and make, until you're tired of it or until the first frost.
Freezing the tomatoes allows a couple things. One, it means I don't have to have a continuous operation running. I can do everything all in one go at a time that's convenient. Two, frozen-then-thawed tomatoes are watery mush. Not good if you want chunky or are worried about texture, absolute perfection for sauce.**
I originally planned to thaw the tomatoes in the fridge, but that fell through. Even a full 48 hours was enough. Okay, I thought, I'll run them through the mill partially thawed.
Nope. Running even partially-thawed tomatoes through the mill was a nonstarter: too much of the pulp was simply pushing out the waste end. Next year I will give it another 24 to 48 hours of time to thaw. For this year, as you can see in picture 1, my trusty dutch oven provided a nudge to thaw them fully.
Once thawed, I put the fruit and any accumulated juices through the mill. Man is that ever slick (compared to past years' labor). Fully thawed frozen tomatoes separated cleanly and easily into juice and waste as you can see in picture 2.
The mill was costly, but my time has value too and having the mill gives me that time back (it's also not going to be a one-trick pony--I processed grapes, blackberries, and will use it the next time I grow and roast squash).
Any juice I collected went to the stockpot while the rest was thawing away in the dutch oven. That's picture 3.
All told, from a harvest of 25 pounds of tomatoes, I got 3.5 pounds of skin and seed along with about 10 quarts of juice. That mill is pretty efficient. About 85% of the harvest went to juice, probably much better than I could have done.
If you're curious to see, picture 4 shows the sum total of waste for the 25 pounds. I don't want to say it was bone dry, but in keeping with the efficiency above, there wasn't a whole lot of moisture left. It wasn't soupy.
From here you reduce the tomato juice down by about half. Hours on the stovetop brought that 10 quarts down to about 4.5 quarts of thick, tomato-y goodness. Somewhere along the way, I sweated some onion, bell pepper, garlic and spices and added them. I put in a little sugar too. After the sauce was fully reduced, I added some chopped fresh basil and parsley--didn't want those in too early so they'd cook out all their fresh flavor.
Believe it or not, after all this time and labor, I was only a bit more than halfway done. I still had to can the sauce. Because I value my sanity, I usually schedule sauce-making for two days. Day 1, make and cool sauce. Day 2 can.
If you would like to see my recipe, I link to it first below. This is a good all around workhorse of a sauce. Pop the can, add some olive oil and parm, you're good for pizza. Add a splash of cream (and parm) and sauce cooked pasta. Use it for meatball subs.
Note: if you want to make and can sauce like I do, you WILL NEED TO PRESSURE CAN IT. This sauce, depending on the tomato and concentration might be acidic enough to water bath, but I would not roll the dice. Botulism, from all I've seen, is not fun.
One last little tidbit for fun. I canned this into wide mouth pints, but I was short by one jar, so I subbed in a regular mouth pint. This regular mouth was one of the last jars I prepared prior to sealing up and canning.
I filled the jar and went to put the lid and ring on, but couldn't find the lid I was sure I got out. Looked everywhere. Giving up, figuring maybe it slid under the microwave or something, I went ahead and got a new lid. Then I buttoned up the canner and processed.
After the jars cooled, sure enough, I found the missing lid ... in one of the wide mouth cans. That's picture 5. You can barely see the edge of the rogue lid up against the side of the can, center of the jar, below the white water line.
Damn.
Best I can figure, since the lids were wet, the regular mouth lid adhered to the bottom of one of the wide mouth lids. In the hurry of filling cans, I didn't see it and it ended up in the tomato sauce of one of the wide mouth cans. I wrote to Ball to ask if I could still eat the sauce, but they didn't recommend it. I tend to agree.
I debated whether it would be safe if I ate this can immediately (rather than letting the metal lid and its various coatings marinate in acidic tomato sauce for weeks), but decided to not. Hurt like hell to give up a pint of sauce that I'd worked since Spring to get, but better that than sick!
Got my plan now for the future. Freeze tomatoes as they ripen, start thawing sooner (so as to not spend the money to heat them prior to running through the mill), and have more care with the lids!
**Great tip too for jam making. Collect ripe (sometimes on the edge of overripe) fruit from your garden or the store when on sale. Freeze. Thaw. Make jam. Less mashing and processing to get the fruit to that jammy, pulp state.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-R-M8RbbaJpvb8-a1NeNsLwilOMu-SfP/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=111965986728590897986&rtpof=true&sd=true
