So, a couple of days ago I blended up a bunch of tomatoes in the blender and dumped them into two crockpots to cook down into sauce. I've made tomato sauce before the traditional way several years back with Mom helping me to can it, but I wanted to try this new method that didn't involve blanching and peeling and chopping and cooking them down on a hot stove for several hours, hoping it would save time and make things easier.



Well...it does save time, but it took 24 hours for the sauce to cook down enough in the crockpots, so while it saves hands on time, I think it would be less irritating and more productive to just cook it down on the stove. Maybe. And the texture was a little weird so I went ahead and cooked it down into paste, which took another 12 hours.

I ended up with 7 pints of paste.



Most paste comes in six ounce cans and you can get 12 cans of organic tomato paste in a pack for $7 at our local Costco. That equals out to a little over 18 and a half six ounce portions for $10.65. It works out to about .57 per serving. The Costco cans work out to .58 a serving. So it's kind of a wash, especially considering I had to add 1 tbsp of lemon juice to each pint to make sure it was acidic enough to water bath can, but I am buying the tomatoes locally which makes me happier with the end result. Plus the flavor can't be beat. If I end up having enough in my own garden to can later on then of course it will be much cheaper.

I am going to try again by running tomatoes through a food mill, letting them sit overnight in the fridge, sucking the pale fluid that rises to the top off with a turkey baster in the morning, and then cooking them down in the crockpot and see if that changes the consistency a little. If not I will make more tomato paste and then try again with the stove-top method which I know works. But before I do that I am going to can diced tomatoes. I will blanch and peel those, though. I am going to get some yellow and orange ones for fun.

Also I can can the pale juice that is sucked off with the baster and use it as soup base later on or to boil pasta in. I will probably only end up with a pint of it or so per batch, but that is okay and I won't be wasting it. Normally that's the part that gets boiled away.

So, it's a work in progress, but I am learning as I go and as long as I end up with usable food in the end, I am happy with whatever results I get.