Preserving Tomatoes

I grow mostly indeterminate tomatoes.  The darker ones, like Black Prince and Cherokee Purple, are my favorites.  A couple of years I grew Frankenstein Black and liked them very much.  At any rate, some years my tomato harvest is a bust.  Deer will eat the plants but don't seem to go for them very often, and stink bugs can be found on them but do not seem to do too much damage.  Even in good years the best I get a slow, steady level of production that is very drawn out over a period of weeks.  I pick them as they ripen (or a little before, then let them ripen indoors).

I do two things with tomatoes (well, three, counting tomato sandwiches).  One is dehydrate them, the other is can them following the NCHFP's recipe for crushed tomatoes.  I then use the tomatoes for a sort of spaghetti sauce that ends up being somewhat runny and very chunky once I add the onions. It's not like Prego, but I still like it. Normally I don't grow paste tomatoes (though I did like the Amish Paste ones I raised one year), so the end product is pretty watery (see below).

Canning requires peeling the tomatoes, which I'm definitely not a fan of (I also hate peeling peaches).  So it's not my first choice, and I find that when I can them, it takes me a while to use them.  I'll use them, but slowly. And, btw, I wouldn't characterize the peeling process as "slip[ping]  off [the] skins."

I haven't done them for a few years, and the last time I did I failed to note the raw amount I needed for the canner load I processed.  So the NCHFP guidelines are probably as good as any.  This can require stocking them in the refrigerator for a few days to build up enough supply to make canning worthwhile.  I'm not going to go through all that work for two or three pints.  I've heard that some don't like refrigerating tomatoes, but it has worked out okay for me.

Dehydrating is another matter.  It's easy to process the tomatoes in small batches as they come in.  Then I just cut the tops off, cut them into 4-8 radial slices, and thrown them in the dehydrator.  They dry down quickly, in 24-48 hours (at 135 degrees; using a cooler temp would extend the time).

Dehydrating them is a little problematic for other reasons: I eat them too fast.  I like the end result very much and down them as snack food.  I think they could be rehydrated, put on pizza, or otherwise used in recipes, but so far I've just eaten them about as fast as I produce them (that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much).

My tomatoes usually stop producing in August or so, then start blooming and producing again with the cooler temperatures of late summer and early fall.  I always have green tomatoes on the vine at the time of the first frost.  There's a recipe for pickled green tomatoes that looks appealing but that I have never made.  I usually try to ripen them, then end up tossing them when that doesn't happen.  Maybe this year...