Well Preserved

Once you have purchased your tomatoes and let them ripen for a few days, it is sauce day!  This is a very exciting day of the year to me – it starts early in the morning and goes through most of they day.  It is a day of tradition, family and a few beer or glasses of wine (though be cautious – 300 pounds of molten tomato does have an element of danger after all).

We start by washing the tomatoes in large buckets and then we slice each one lengthwise.  There are a lot of people who skip this step and put the whole tomatoes directly into the tomato press.  We cut them to look for hidden rot and deep bruising that you may miss if examining only the surface.  We generally find less then 12 tomatoes like this a year (from 6-8 bushels).

We are spoiled with a motorized press.  My father used to have a manual (hand crank) press and the work was quadruple.  He later added a furnace motor to it to semi-automate the process (this contraption also liked to spit tomatoes over everything as it consumed them).  We later moved to a motorized press (our model was around $450 divided by two families).  We now process twice the amount of tomatoes in half the time that we used to.

The process is simple – tomato halves are loaded into the funnel at the top of the mill and crushed within the machine.  Seeds and skins are expelled into one bucket and sauce into another.

Now a few tips and things to think about:

1. The initial colour is odd.  Expect a funny pinkish hue – when the tomatoes begin to react to the heat an odd foam will appear.  This is normal – the cooking process will turn it a deeper red and the foam will reduce.
   
2. The seeds and skins can be put through the mill several times to extract more sauce.  We wait until we have a large quantity of discard before we stop the machine before adding all the skins to the top.  As they go through the machine, I place my hand at the place where the skins are expelled.  Be careful not to reach in (the screw and press is very close to the end).  I let my hand fill before gently plugging the end of the press until a small bit of  pressure pushes back on my hands.  This allows me to pull an entire plug of seed and skin to be processed again.  I repeat this several times.
   
3. Add the sauce to your pan as you go and ensure the heat is on.  Best results come from heating the sauce as soon as possible and it is best to heat as you go and add fresh pulp to heated sauce (you are not trying to bring it to a rapid boil but want a gentle simmer).  This will help prevent separation.
4. Bees and wasps love the smell of the harvest.  A windy day is great if you are fortunate enough to choose.  Bee or wasp traps are a close second.
5. We love setting up under an overhang – a sudden change of weather would create havoc if rain decided to join your day of preserving.
6. This is a task that you want to share with others.  It is a lot of work and creating any significant quantity would be hard alone.  We find that 4 people is best for our needs.  This also makes the expense of a press far more bearable.  A $500 press could easily be shared between 2-4 sets of 4 people as long as they don’t prepare their tomatoes on the same day.  It takes us about 30 minutes a bushel to transform tomatoes to pulp (it was closer to 50 minutes at the start).
   
7. Wear gloves.  It has taken me 3 years of learning this lesson the hard way before finally getting wise to this.  The acid in the tomatoes will eat your skin and it can be very painful.  Tomato water will keep your fingers wet for hours and your skin will soften before giving in to a slow burn.  It is just not worth the pain.

Tune in tomorrow for tips on cooking the sauce down!