What speed to use on kitchenaid food strainer?

[Emerald]

Well stewed tomatoes are on tap for next weekend. so I might just pick up another half bushel of those firm romas to go with my next lot of home grown ones.. those romas were so firm they should make great stewed with good chunk to them.
I'll probably run my Rutgers thru the machine and cook them down as sauce to go in with my stewed. my mother thinks it is too much work but admits that my stewed tomatoes are very thick and nice.
It is a bit of work I guess. but I cook down the chunks and veggies and ladle off the clear "broth" and cook it down in yet another pan and then have the thicker sauce going in the smaller stock pot and then when the tomato chunks get to where I like them I add the thicker sauce and the cooked down "broth" so that it looks like you get spaghetti sauce with chunks of tomato and veggie. No clear juice with floaty bits for me. But that is just a personal thing. my mother used to can and her stewed maters would have a huge layer of clear and either sunken or floating tomato bits. Sure they did still taste good but I am a foodie and love my pretty! I eat with my eyes first.. but that being said.. I have put some of the weirdest looking stuff in my mouf! pretty doesn't always mean it tastes good.. a good liver pate doesn't always look the best..

 

[Mickey328]

Sounds like my kind of stewed! I strained this year rather than cooking down. Didn't make it quite as thick as I'd like but at least the jars aren't half full of sera. I just dumped the ground stuff in a colander over a bucket and let it sit for a while. Then put all the pulp in one bucket and the juice in another. The holes in the colander let some good pulp and seeds through, so we strained the juice again through a cheesecloth lined strainer. I'm quite pleased with how it all turned out. With DH helping we got it all prepped in about 5 hours and the next day it took me about 8 hours to get it all processed. Of course, a lot of that was down time, just waiting for the canner to finish. Our altitude is about 5000 ft, so processing times are fairly long.

Seems to have been worth the effort...DH and DS loved how the tomato/veg juice turned out...drank a whole jar already

I have to work til noon tomorrow, so I'm hoping to at least get the plum jam done in the afternoon. Hopefully it'll be fairly cool so I don't get the house all hot and humidified.