Canning Tomatoes

I thought I would share some pictures of the canning process.

First we wash and then blanch the tomatoes. We put them in very hot water for about 30 seconds.


When they come out of the hot water, we put them in some ice cold water to cool them enough that we can handle them. You can see here that the hot and cold water treatment causes the skins to split.

Here is a close up of the split skin on a Cherokee Purple. At this point, we take the skin off the tomato.


This is a skinned tomato. We put these in jars. As we shove these into the hot jars (they have been a hot water bath of their own to this point) they produce enough liquid to fill in the spaces between the tomatoes.


They can be processes in a boiling water bath or in a pressure cooker. We added some lemon juice per the USDA recommendations to increase the acidity.

When they are done, they look like this:




Of course, we did all this on the woodstove too!