Tomato season is upon us. This is the recipe we will try this weekend.

Ingredients and Tools

• 1 hot water bath canner
• 7 quart jars
• 1 quart tomato juice
• 1 medium sized pot
• Thermometer – reads 150-200 easily in liquid
• 20 pounds of tomatoes, stems removed (plus 3# more for tomato juice)

Notes

1. Heat canner to a boil.
2. Prepare ice bath in medium sized bowl.
3. Heat tomato juice to warn, below a boil.
4. With small pairing knife, slit tomatoes and slide off skins
5. Remove tough core pieces (they do a lot of crunches on the vine)
6. If doing quartered tomatoes, then cut accordingly. If not, then, well, you can skip this step, can’t you?
7. Fill each jar with tomatoes, then fill up the rest of the jar with juice.
8. Can, baby, can.
9. Process 40 minutes. Make sure not to have the canner at a boil, but under 200 degrees F. Less of a canning time will possibly result in spoilage (popped up lids), so don’t skimp on this. Also, these are full of air, so don’t bring the water to a full boil. The jars will float to the top, bounce around and possibly break if that happens.

Adopted from Pickyourown.org and a smattering of other sources.

Yields 7 quart jars.

NOTES:

This was our first attempt at tomato filling. Why add the juice when we can just stuff more full tomatoes? I’m not really sure.