Preserving Tomatoes For The Winter

With the season of tomatoes coming to a close, all I can think of is how I’d love to preserve this beautiful summer crop it into the winter months. Here’s how you can do it.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, these are a handful of techniques to get you started in preserving tomatoes for the winter. Is there anything better than a ripe tomato in the summer? Not really! I enjoy them stewed, fresh in a salad or in bruschetta, made into a quick summer sauce, eaten in tomato sandwiches, canned, you name it. And we easily forget this but we can also have summer fresh produce in the winter if we just preserve it at the right time.

Preserving tomatoes for the winter with Canning

Of course, canning is the first way to go. Yes, it can be labor intensive but it beats freezing! (I say this because during hurricane season on the East Coast, I always wonder if our power is going to go out, and with it, our freezer and all of our frozen goods). There are many canning books out there that have great tutorials, such as the Ball Complete of Home Preserving, The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving (my favorite), and the Prepper’s Canning Guide.

The gist of canning, in a nut shell: Halve or quarter tomatoes, cook (roast or simmer) them down until the skins come off, process through a food mill, season, add lemon juice and can. It’s pretty simple, in theory. However there are practices out there that are necessary to master in order to ensure the safety of your cans. For this reason, I highly recommend researching and learning before you start. A great resource is Homesteading Family and their 4-lesson canning course is great! I highly recommend starting there. It’s free, and Carolyn has a great way of making it understandable, easy, and safety-conscious, which gets my vote!

One quick tip: I love finding “seconds” tomatoes, the ones with cracks, some holes, you name it. I was able to get a huge box of tomatoes like these for $5 at the farmers markets and I was in heaven. Of course, you have to process and clean them that day, but it’s totally worth it for the price. What I found is that they were perfectly wonderful to use, just not the most aesthetically pleasing (hence the discount). Look for deals like these, and you’ll have a great amount of tomato sauce for a pretty nice deal!

Preserving Tomatoes for the Winter by Freezing Raw Tomatoes

You can freeze quartered tomatoes for a quick winter sauce with olive oil and garlic (this is my favorite method). The tomatoes break down anyway, and it’s a quick way to preserve tomatoes when you don’t feel like canning in summer heat.

Cherry Tomato Freezer Sauce

This is one of my absolute favorite ways to freeze tomatoes.

1. Simply gather enough cherry tomatoes so they lay in a single layer. I used 9×11 pan, and therefore had about 4-6 cups of tomatoes, although the size of them will dictate the amount. Either halve the tomatoes, or pierce them with a knife so they don’t explode.

2. Drizzle with a little olive oil, and throw in about 2-3 cloves of garlic, still in their skin, and any herbs you’d like to add.

3. Roast at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, until their skins have broken and released some juices.

4. Let cool.

5. You can freeze them as is (in freeze bags, and make sure you leave at least 1 inch of headspace in the bag to allow expansion).

6. Otherwise, process in a food processor with some salt and pepper to taste, then freeze in individual freezer bags. I leave at least 1 inch headspace for expansion, and freeze in individual bags, laying flat. Once frozen, you can stand them all upright in the freezer and they won’t take up much room since they’re flat.

Preserving Tomatoes for the Winter by Dehydrating

Simply slice your tomatoes and dehydrate on a teflex-lined dehydrator sheet at 112 degrees overnight. If you’d like them a bit on the softer side, it means they’ve retained some water, so store them in the fridge or freezer. If you’d like them a bit harder (which I do), that means all of the moisture is gone and you can safely store them in a ball jar in the pantry. You can also add them to oil and leave them in the fridge this way to soften and infuse the oil with flavor.

Note: when dehydrating tomatoes, they will not turn bright red like your store-bought versions (which often contain sulfites). A darker red/brown is totally normal.

Oil-preserved Tomatoes

I recently learned this trick from Shaye Elliott from the Elliott Homestead. While I haven’t done it yet, it’s on my radar and hope to soon. Here is the recipe.

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