Yesterday's harvest from the garden (note: this does not include half a dozen heirloom tomatoes, plus the dozens and dozens that went into cans)
I don't mean to brag (okay, maybe I do), but our garden is killing it. We've already harvested more carrots, beets, swiss chard, and zucchinis than we typically eat in an entire year. My boss, family, and friends have all been receiving weekly gifts of produce, and I've spent many a weekend making pickled beets and zucchini, as well as cooking up loaf after loaf of carrot beet bread. It means that I don't really leave the kitchen over the weekend (and if I do, it's just to head to the garden to harvest more goodies), but I'm happy in my role of cook, canner, creative-use-thinker, and co-head gardener.
Heirlooms are the future, people (also, check out the rad tablecloth we got in Ecuador!)
Joe and I are both back from Ecuador now (I'm really looking forward to spending some of this week catching up with the multitude of blog posts I've missed out on, and crafting a few of my own as I get back into the swing of things), and we spent this past weekend dealing with the many dozens of ripe red tomatoes that greeted us when we got home. In addition to lots of tender and delicious heirlooms with nearly-purple flesh so incredibly good that it's all we can do to not brag to everyone we see about how tasty they are, we harvested enough beefsteak tomatoes this weekend to fill fourteen pint jars. So that's precisely what I did.*
The first step is to parboil the whole tomatoes, peel them, and then dice them into the desired size. I was pretty liberal with the chopping, just making sure that they were small enough to fit into jars. I'm all for chunks of tasty tomato flesh. Then the tomatoes are quickly heated to boiling in their own juices (it's important not to add any additional water here, as the tomatoes will lose some flavor. Trust me, they definitely have sufficient juice to not scald). I did this while the water for the canning hot water bath was heating on another burner. (Note: it is highly beneficial to enjoy a tasty brew during this step. Peeling and chopping this many tomatoes is hard work!)
Now, while the water heats and the tomatoes cook, let's talk about tools. My first and most important canning-related purchase this year was a giant coated aluminum stockpot (the blue one on the left). It very much reminds me of the pot in which Yosemite Sam tries to cook Bugs Bunny (if you, like me, were raised with old-school, and sometimes shockingly inappropriate, Looney Tunes cartoons, do yourself a favor and watch that video). Long story short, it's big (that's what she said). Anyway, I also have a series of little canning helpers that make some of the steps loads easier. My favorite is the jar-grabber-thing, which saves my hands from boiling hot water while I load jars in and out of the pot. There's also a funnel for reduced tomato spillage, a neat little bubble-eliminator thing and a magnetic wand for pulling sterilized lids out of their pot of boiling water (if you haven't figured it out yet, there's a lot of boiling water in the canning process).
Since I don't have a pressure canner, I do all of my canning in a boiling water bath. This means that in order to avoid botulism (note: you do want to avoid botulism), certain fruits and vegetables need added acid to keep them safe. I use citric acid, a bit in each jar, for diced tomatoes. After loading the diced and hot vegetables into the jars, I placed them in the boiling stockpot for 35 minutes and then carefully removed them and let them cool. (Another note: in my opinion, there may not be anything more beautiful than a series of jars, freshly filled with homegrown tomatoes.)
Once the tomatoes had cooled completely (this takes between 12-24 hours, so if you're doing this, be patient!), I checked the seals on each jar and labeled each jar with the date of canning. Happily, none of my seals broke this time, but if they had, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Broken-seal jars just need to be eaten within about 10 days (not so bad, if you ask me). Jars with good seals should last about a year.
*Final note: If you are planning to can tomatoes, make pickles, etc., please find a good reference book for instructions and recipes. I hope this post is informative and useful, but since we're dealing with preserving food for a year, please be sure to follow instructions from a book to a T. I use Back to Basics: Traditional Kitchen Wisdom and Putting Food By, alternately, when I'm canning.
Pickling and canning is not a fast process, and it's not a process in which you can really cut corners. When canning food, everything has to be immaculately clean, and each specific step has to be followed pretty faithfully. But, there's something totally satisfying, and a little bit zen, about spending all day meticulously filling jars, measuring tomatoes, and testing seals. And the final product, that is, good, homegrown food that will last into the cold months when the garden is no longer producing, is well worth the trouble. Happy canning!
Title song: Greg Brown, "Canned Goods"
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