Produce > Edible Plants

Tomatoes and storage

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Obelixx:
40 pots of passata so far and now adding semi dried in oil to the collection.

The big ones take a lot longer to shrink down, even when cut into smaller pieces but I now have separate jars of red cherry, red pear, black cherry; green zebra, ananas and rose de Berne.  More to do on Tuesday as I've been busy with other stuff today and am out all day tomorrow.

I might just grow fewer plants next year.

BarriedaleNick:
One other thing I do is tomato powder.  Really dry them out and blitz them up to make a powder.  Keeps for ages and is great for stews, curries, soups, pasta etc..

Obelixx:
I don't have a dehydrator, just the ovens and they'd have to be on for days to dry our tomatoes enough to make a powder.   Lovely idea tho.

BarriedaleNick:
I dry chilis and some stuff in our sun room here!  Still 30c today and the room get lots of sun so it is great for drying stuff.

Vinlander:
I've always found that tomatoes lose flavour when frozen on their own (sometimes you can see a layer of oil from them on the inside of the bag but it's almost impossible to make use of it).

The answer is to heat them in a pan with as little as half or even a quarter the quantity of fried onions and freeze that - IMHO it stops any of the flavour being lost and I can't personally think of a single recipe for cooked tomatoes that isn't improved by onions.

Obviously it takes up a bit of extra space in the freezer (and everyone is running out about now) but you can counteract that by letting it reduce a bit more in the pan.

This process of making the first stage of a recipe and freezing it has the same magic effect on any problem vegetable - especially green beans (which can taste fishy when frozen alone). In fact the only veg that doesn't need it is fresh peas and mature beans (seeds) - I'm sure the skin on the seed does that trick.

Cheers.

PS. I've been leaving as many Green Tigers (aka Highlander) as I can spare to shrivel slightly on the vine because it intensifies the flavour (the skin is tough enough to keep most bugs & fungi out - at least under cover). The same applies to Shimmer - I think they are close relatives, though the skins aren't quite as reliable - some people want thin skins more than flavour -  :BangHead: Bonkers. I've never tasted a sun dried tomato that comes within a mile of it - most of the commercial ones taste of nothing at all - cardboard maybe?

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