Pages

12/20/08

Photos of Home Canned Tomato Juice

Looking through my files this morning I decided I was really tired of looking at these photos and wanted to get them posted. Never mind that it's December and everyone's tomato plants stopped producing 3 months ago! (Ha ha).

This was intended to be a post on what I did with the cherry tomatoes that just would not stop producing this year! For whatever reason (it made sense at the time) I planted 4 or 5 cherry tomato plants last summer. Not realizing how over-abundant they would become we had brilliant small salad tomatoes coming out our ears. By the end of the season when everything else had stopped producing and I was starting to compost the vines and remains, my plants were still giving me tomatoes.

Although not optimal for this usage, I went ahead and used a bunch of them to make my canned salsa (tasted amazing but did have a lot of tomato skins in it as you can't skin and seed a tiny cherry tomato as you can a regular tomato!), I also made many into homemade tomato juice as well as resorting to filling gallon baggies and freezing them whole for use in chili and soup this winter.

Here are some photos I snapped of making homemade tomato juice. Although these are not the tomatoes you want to use, if you are trying to use up pounds and pounds of cherry salad tomatoes, this is what it looks like when you make homemade juice out of them!

Starting to cook them. As they get hot they get very plump and shiny.



Continuing to simmer them they start to break down into their own juices.


Straining the pulp and skin from the juice.



Pure, fresh, hot tomato juice.



*Note*

This is not being 'canned'. This particular jar wasn't filled all the way so he went into the refrigerator for immediate use that week.

The other filled jars had 1/2 t salt and 1/2 t lemon juice added and then were sealed and given a 35 minute water bath to process.


If you don't have enough juice to completely fill the canning jar make sure you refrigerate it and use it within a week or two. Do not try to process a half filled jar.Print Friendly and PDF