Freezing Tomatoes

Hear comes the frost...but I'm not ready! I've canned tomatoes and salsa and spaghetti sauce, yet I still have tomatoes in my garden. I do not want the tomatoes to go to waste and I want to can some interesting recipes I have found (Tomato Soup, Mandarin Sauce, Vegetable Sweet and Sour) that call for many fresh tomatoes but I just don't have time right now. It's frustrating because if I wait and do it later, my garden full of lovely tomatoes will be a bunch of mush from the combination of freezing and thawing and bugs and snails, etc. Frustrating, yes...but I found a solution!!

I put all my tomatoes in the freezer. I'll get them out later when I am much less busy than right now. I'm imaging bringing them out of the freezer on a cold, snowy day when I can spend the entirety of it in the kitchen, cooking to feed the family.

Here's what I did. I marched right out into the garden with a 2 laundry baskets. I harvested all the remaining tomatoes. I pulled out the garden hose and rinsed off all the tomatoes. I filled my canner half full of water (any large pot(s) will do) and brought it to a boil. I filled my kitchen sink with cold water. I dropped about 10 tomatoes at a time into the boiling water. After about 30 seconds I fished the tomatoes out of the boiling water and plunked them into the cold water in the sink. When cool, I slipped off the skin and cut out the core of each tomato and dropped it into a large, clean bowl.

I kept up this process with all the remaining tomatoes. Since the water in my sink warms considerably with each batch of 10 or so tomatoes, I kept the cold water running to keep the water in the sink cold. This won't work if you only have one kitchen sink (but you could use a big bowl). I have 2 sinks and when the sink is full it will overflow into the other sink and right down the drain.

As the bowl filled with tomatoes, I transferred them to gallon freezer bags. I pressed all (as much as possible) the air out of the bags and put them in the freezer where they will wait patiently for that cold, snowy day in the (probably) near future.

O. Are you worried about the laundry baskets that were left outside by the hose? Lonely. With random bits of tomato stuff in/on them. Worry no more. I rinsed out my laundry baskets and put them back by the washer where they will beg for laundry to fill them instead of tomatoes.