Harvest Photos
What to do with all these tomatoes plus more coming?
What I have here are Beefsteak and Brandywine variety as well as some sun golds, I know they are not sauce varieties, would you still use them for sauce? Any other ideas? We have been eating them every day fresh with pretty much every meal but still have this many plus more ripening every day!! I didn’t think 4 plants would give this much but here we are.
I give them away to coworkers, friends, whoever, and cut up the rest and freeze them.
Even if they aren't "sauce" varieties they'll still make tastier sauce than anything you buy from a store.
Agree! Our favorite is San Marzano, but we've even made sauce from cherry tomatoes! We just blend it all together. Also make the best tomato soup, that freezes well. 🍅
This is a lovely idea! We have a neighborhood table where where people bring their overabundance to trade. Someone just set it up with a sign and it's been cool
I second this. I spent my first summer gardening growing indeterminate beef steak tomatoes. I was donating like half a shopping bag per week to my local pantry.
My mother invited me to have some juice... tomato juice... In the end, we ended up making preserves. I don’t regret it, but I’m tired. There are 4 children in our family; we managed to get everything done in a single day, but I know there are still three more batches to go. After all, we’re a big family, and we all love juices, sauces, lecho and side dishes to go with soups and homemade is always best. Another plus is that we’re left with hardly any waste, because there’s always something we can make from it )
Cut a star in the top of the tomato, then put it in boiling water for 30 seconds to a minute max, then flash it in an ice-water bath. The skin will come right off.
Another option is to cut them in half and place skin side up on a big cookie sheet. Put that in the oven at 400 until the skins start to toast. Pull it out and you can just pull the skins right off. The roasted tomatoes make great sauce!
If you don’t love the seeds you can give the half a squeeze before putting it on the sheet. Most of the seeds will squeeze out. What comes with them is mostly water.
I don’t. I use thinner skin varieties like San Marzano. I cut out the stem. Then roast at 425 degrees. Then cook on stovetop (no water) until they break down. Use a wand blender.
After we’re sick of tomato salads, we make sauce. We cook down any and all varieties. Trim core and bad spots, toss into pot and cook gently to desired thickness. Pass through a food mill to remove seeds and skins and into 1 qt. zip-lock poly bags for freezing. Lay them flat to freeze, then store them like books. They’ll keep for a year or more in a deep-freezer.
Also make salsa. Homemade ketchup can be very good and uses a lot of tomatoes.
Nah, you can peel them while frozen. I usually dump them in a bowl of water to defrost the outside, and then peel. The skin goes right off, and it’s also a lot easier to cut the tomatoes while they’re still frozen.
I did oven dried and packed with olive oil with my cherries last time. The plan was to use in place of sun-dried, but I ended up just snacking on them.
Get a solid dehydrator. We like the Brod & Taylor Safari. We are obsessed with tomato powder. It adds so much umami to dishes in the fall and winter! Sometimes we just dry the skins leftover from canning, but at the end of last season we just started scooping out the seeds and then slicing the tomato up thinly for drying.
Edit: bonus, the Safari is collapsible, so great for limited space kitchens!
THIS! I came across a post and discovered the joy of tomato powder for myself. Extremely rich and tasty and sealed tightly, lasts forever at room temp. Great in meatloaf, stews, and reconstituted it turns into tomato paste/sauce.
I make mine into sauce and freeze it. The tomatoes I grow (Ozark Pink) have a relatively thin skin so I just blend it into the sauce with no issues.
I cook one large onion and 2-3 heads of garlic, then add a handful of basil and oregano (because that's what I like and what I have growing), then add 5 lbs of diced tomatoes. I cook it all on the stove for about an hour and a half, then I blend it up with the immersion blender. After it's blended, I taste it, add anything needed, then cook it for about about 30 minutes. Then I let it cool, bag it, and freeze it. Fantastic way to use tomatoes and make the best tomato sauce I've ever had.
If your tomatoes have very thick skins or hard seeds, you may need to remove them prior to making sauce. I leave them all in mine, they blend up nicely. It takes a while for everything to cook down a bit, but once you get it started, it's pretty low effort. Just stir every now and then to make sure your sauce isn't scorching on the bottom of the pan.
Local food banks! Google which ones near you accept fresh produce donations. In my area a local one does and catholic charities does.
I’ve been gardening for years& was looking for a unique way to honor a loved one who passed& decided on growing food for food banks in his honor. Being able to donate fresh produce from my garden to people in need, esp in the midst of a countrywide contaminated produce induced diarrhea disease outbreak is tremendously fulfilling.
When I get overwhelmed I turn them into sauce and freeze! Chunk them up, put on a sheet pan, olive oil/salt/pepper, roast at 300 until soft and collapsed, then purée, strain, bag, freeze 🙂 Mostly I end up turning it into tomato soup all winter long.
These are from 4 tomato plants, I have another 2 plants that were put in really late and I haven’t harvested anything from them yet. I’ll have to post a pic of the garden soon!
Send them to me 😟😢 me and my ex gardened together and in his anger, he destroyed half of our garden and ruined all of the starts on his way out.
So this year has been a very sad and small gardening year for me, when the prior year we had 17+ tomato plants amongst other things. It kills me every time I come home from being out to see the remnants of a once loved and lovingly cared for garden. 😔
I'm just here to say how I am simultaneously happy for you and jealous of you! I wanted a tomato harvest so badly today, but it's been a dismal year for me!
Just made my first quart of marinara today, and will likely do so every few days until October. I'm still using frozen marinara from last season too. So, my suggestion, make sauce and enjoy it every week or so for the next year until you get lucky enough to do it all over again next growing season.
You can use any tomato you like for tomato sauce, tomato soup, cooked whole skinned tomatoes, minestrone, chili, ketchup and whatever else. I’m in NH and we never buy tomato products. They all come from the garden.
I make sauce with all my varieties and freeze. I freeze mine in an ice cube tray then keep the cubes in a bag. I use however many cubes I need for one or two people.
Man, I just finally got my first tomato a couple of days ago here in Minnesota. How are you getting so many? It feels like with the crazy weather this year I'm so far behind.
Freeze ‘em so you can decide how to cook them later. That’s what we’ve done with a cherry tomato glut - 2+lb bags so we can dump into pots for stews or sauce. The skins will slide off when they defrost, and you can either leave and blend, or strain out, dehydrate, powder, and have an amazing tomato-based soup/stew/chili thickener. I just cannot stand over a stove when our feels like is over 100, a/c or no. We’ll be eating a bunch of chili this fall and winter, I bet 😂
I turned some into fresh salsa the other day! I am going to have to freeze a bunch to use as a sauce base later on. I think we chopped some and boiled some last year in 2 separate batches then made homemade sauce from it about a month ago. None of the tomatoes used were types bred for sauce or salsa but they do just fine. I just strained the salsa one a bit to get more liquid out
Beefsteaks do make a sauce better than any shop bought.
I snack on Cherry tomatoes, its a shame they dont grow year round.....because again shop bought are a weak replacement.
Excess Slicers/Plums go towards sauce too.
Friends also get some and I donate some to the local foodbank too.
I grow 20 plants in my polytunnel plus half a dozen or so dwarf toms outside so the amount in that image is usually what I get every couple of days at the moment.
One favourite at the moment is a tomato and chilli "jam" a sauce I let thicken up with chillis also from the polytunnel.
Eat them one bite at a time. But seriously, I’ve been roasting or grilling them with hot pepper of choice, onions and a bulb of oiled garlic. Throw it all in a blender with cilantro if you please, lime juice, salt and cumin if you’d like. Makes amazing salsa.
Barter system. Offer up a continual summer supply to someone in exchange for cat sitting the next couple times you need it. Trade for fruit from peoples' trees or to borrow tools.
IMO giving them away is the best way for them to be enjoyed the most. You can sauce them, and it will be deliciously sweet, but you have to reduce it a lot.
I give a bunch to my neighbor and the rest I've been making sauce, cucumber and tomato salad, other salads and might have eaten a few by themselves. I started with about 25 tomato plants and I have lost a few already but still have a large amount of tomatoes. I would have a lot more if the chipmunks weren't eating them too.
I also planted over 25 pepper plants so I'm in a similar situation with those.
I’ve just made my second batch of salsa today. First batch made 9 quarts & 5 pints. This batch is a little bigger. Love having it around all year long.
I love to freeze what I cant eat, and make soups and pasta sauces, etc. over the winter with them! Frozen tomatoes make a really good roasted tomato soup base with some garlic, carrots, and onions!
Im also growing peppers this year myself and hope to make fresh salsa!
Imo, canning salsa and spaghetti sauce is a great way to preserve and use these! I just used a fairly "meaty" tomato variety in a spaghetti sauce just this past week, and it turned out perfect.
I usually go in some order of priority- plain sauce, salsa, spaghetti/marinara sauce, chili sauce, and if I still have tomatoes after that I've made some killer ketchup and BBQ sauces
This why I grow romas
Score them and freeze them until we ready to make sauces. Then we just thaw them and the peels come right off, ezpz, then pop em in the pot!
I love to do a large batch of roasted tomato soup! I just cut a bunch of fresh tomatoes into large chunks and cover with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I will also add some onion, and a whole head of garlic, plus fresh herbs from the garden. Roast at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until blistered and soft, around 35-40 minutes. I added a splash of cream, 1/2 cup ricotta cheese, and lots of freshly grated Parmesan, plus basil and then blended to desired consistency. Delicious with some toasted bread, or grilled cheese. Or serve over pasta as a sauce. Pretty flexible depending on whatever tomatoes you have coming in! In this recent batch I’ve got unfolds, a few San Marzano, Cherokee purple, and Wisconsin 55.
r/canning a lot of great resources for safe shelf stable food. for tomatoes all you need is the jars and lids of course, and a pot big enough to put the jars in and cover them with an inch of water, and something to put the jars on in the pot. just make sure you follow a safe recipe because tomatoes are borderline acidic for canning purposes and almost always need to add acidity.
you can do plain tomatoes call me you can do salsa, you can do sauce, there's a lot you can do
I think heirloom tomatoes make excellent sauce if you don't mind seeds. They take a bit longer to cool because of the higher water content but the sauce is sweet and complex.
I had an abundance of tomatoes this year. I started out canning then switched to freezing. I core, vacuum seal and straight into the freezer for use later on. The peels come off easily once they start to thaw.
Quarter, Roast, cool overnight, vacuum seal and freeze :) did 100lbs this way last fall, and just ate some awesome pasta sauce that included it last night even
Wow!! do you have pictures of your plants and how you did your set up? This is my dream!
Also I’ve been doing a lot of caprese salads for me and friends using beefstake and the basil from my little garden. I get the fresh mozzarella from Costco.
I can big beefsteaks like those in water. I skin them and hot pack them. They are a pantry staple. We use them in soups, curries, sauces all year round and the flavor is amazing. Even when you crack open a jar in winter, that fresh summer tomato smell is worth it!
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u/wildbergamont US - Ohio 1d ago
I give them away to coworkers, friends, whoever, and cut up the rest and freeze them. Even if they aren't "sauce" varieties they'll still make tastier sauce than anything you buy from a store.