WHAT ARE YOU CANNING TODAY?

[Mini Horses]

That pulpy ketchup will work great for meatloaf and on a burger, ya won't even know it's lumpy!

Good call on juice!! It's why some things are canned, to have when market doesn't. It's pretty, too.

I've never made ketchup but may when I have too many tomatoes next time. Since I don't use a lot, I buy.

You've got nice neighbors!

 

[flowerbug]

picked tomatoes a little bit ago so we'll be canning those tonight.

 

[flowerbug]

finished washing up the pans a few minutes ago, still need some processing time on the half gallon jars. 28 quarts and a pint (which isn't being sealed). the oven holds that much, i'm trying to remember in the past if i've ever done a larger batch, but i don't know for sure if any more would fit. tomorrow morning i'll see if any more jars will fit because it would be nice to know for next year if i ever get in a similar spot.

i think this makes it enough tomatoes put up for the year, there's still a few buckets out there of smaller tomatoes that we'll pick and eat from but otherwise i'm ready to call it good enough.

amazingly with all the dry weather we've had the past few weeks and the wide sprawling way the tomato plants have grown this year all of the plants still have some leaves on them. normally by the time we get to this point in the process disease takes the leaves out almost completely. the plants are flowering and putting on new fruits. i'll leave them alone and let the bees have some food.

 

[Mini Horses]

the oven holds that

I've heard of oven canning, never tried. What's the prep method and how do you store after? Success/failure? Only your tomatoes?

 

[flowerbug]

I've heard of oven canning, never tried. What's the prep method and how do you store after? Success/failure? Only your tomatoes?

we only do acidic items now but years ago Mom did all of our canning this way. a lot of time for the non-acidic items. it's not a recommended way of doing things, but for acidic items i'm quite ok with it.

rinse off tomatoes and dunk in boiling water to get the skins to release (30 seconds works for the variety we grow, might be different for others) and then i drop them into cold water so they can cool before they get stacked on a towel to absorb the extra drips of water. core and peel off skins and chunk and put into pots to warm up. warm up to hot, warm up jars a little.

hot pack the jars leaving head space, wipe down the rims, put the lids on and tighten (all this as you would for BWB canning IMO). put in oven for a period of time at about 250F to get some of the air to expand and come out so that when they cool off they're sealed.

how long to put things in for depends upon how hot the contents. i usually go between a half hour and 45 minutes for quarts, but if i'm doing an entire oven rack full i'll add extra time. those half gallon jars i did last night i turned the oven off after and hour and a half and then left them in there the rest of the night. they were still too hot to the touch this morning so i had to use pads to move them. this pretty much probably destroys a lot of the vitamin C content of them as they shouldn't be left that long, but we primarily are using them for the flavor anyways and eat other things more fresh and full of vitamin C.

seal failure rate for me is about 1 jar in a thousand. i don't keep exact counts any longer as i can't even remember the last time a seal didn't hold. i always inspect jars for cracks and chips before using and make sure they are clean. spoiling failures are also pretty rare but they do happen sometimes if a bit of whatever gets put in the jar. some years we've had tomatoes that did not form properly and they were a mess to process (we called them brains as that is what they looked like). gladly this year not many tomatoes at all had strange shapes and that really helps during coring and peeling to not have to spend a lot of time looking for bits of inclusions in the tomatoes.