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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
canning and food mill questions!
last year I canned tomatoes - all I did was boil for a very short time to get skins off, cut, squeezed out some of the juice and seeds.
this year I decided to use a food mill. the ball blue book said for tomato sauce to cut out the cores and cook for 20 mins then run through the food mill. well my tomatoes turned mostly into water! it said to cook again reducing by half before canning. I didn't have the patience to wait for it to reduce, which may have taken forever b/c it was seriously thin. I liked how the mill got rid of all the skins, etc. but really not sure if it was less/more time consuming than what I did last year....
any tips?? TIA!
Re: canning and food mill questions!
It depends on what kind of tomatoes you used. Some have more liquid than others. Paste tomatoes (Amish paste, Roma, San Marzanos) are more suitable for pasta sauces.
When I canned just regular tomatoes, I did the dip in the boiling, then right after iced water. Peeled and cut them up in quarters (or halves; depending on their size). I cooked them in my Le Creusset for maybe 10 minutes until they started to fall apart and then crushed them with the thingy you use for mashed potatoes. Then I had a colander prepared and ready to go in my sink, transferred the tomatoes from the Le Creusset and drained them this way.
For salsa, I follow the same procedure for peeling (boiling water followed by ice bath). Then I pretty much had to cut them up manually. Last year, I tried running it through food processor and it turned the tomatoes into red water. So yesterday, I cut up 35 lbs of tomatoes for salsa. By hand. Took 6 hours.
The only thing I use the food mill for is tomato soup and even with that, you need to cook for a looong, long time to reduce it to soup and not watery consistency.
We have a food strainer/sauce maker, it looks like this:
The first time we used it, we followed the Blue Book instructions and also got really watery sauce. The following time, we tried out just putting the raw tomatoes (no dipping or cooking) into the machine and it worked great. We just quarter the tomatoes and put them in the hopper. The machine spits all the skin, seeds, and core out the chute on the side, so all you get down the slide is a thick paste. We only have to reduce the paste for about 45 minutes on the stove to get a nice pasta sauce consistency. No dealing with boiling water and hot tomatoes, or all those extra steps. Once we figured this out, canning tomato sauce became so much easier.
ETA: We use 'Celebrity' tomatoes, a standard hybrid slicing tomato. They're the most plentiful and therefore cheapest at our Farmer's Market. We get a nice, thick flavorful sauce without having to use paste-type tomatoes, like 'Roma' or 'San Marzano.'
awesome! I have the oxo food mill (http://www.oxo.com/p-476-food-mill.aspx) and will try putting some uncooked tomatoes in. do you think it will work the same as yours?