100% Natural, No Sugar, Preservatives, or Aspirin, Little to No Salt! Canned Tomatoes for Winter
Tomatoes in a jar for the winter, 100% natural, without sugar, aspirin, preservatives or anything else! Quartered or whole tomatoes, in tomato juice.
We buy as many kilos of tomatoes as we want to preserve and choose the softest ones. We cut them in half and grate them on a fine grater. The remaining skin is thrown away. Of course, you can also put them whole in the blender if you wish.
The firmer tomatoes are cut into quarters or halves depending on their size. The stems are removed. If we want to preserve cherry tomatoes, we make a cross-shaped incision at the top and leave them whole.
We take 720 ml jars, with new lids, we cram as many pieces of tomatoes into them without pressing them and add a teaspoon of salt to each jar (if we don't want to, we can leave the salt out at all). Each jar contains ~ 500 g of tomatoes.
Fill the jar with grated tomato pulp. Using the back of a spoon or a utensil, place the contents so that the liquid penetrates to the bottom (between 200 and 250 g of tomato pulp enters each jar). The jars must be full to the brim.
Screw the lids on tightly.
Prepare a large pot with a towel on the bottom and place the jars in it. Fill with water until almost the lid.
Boil the jars for 30 minutes from the moment the water starts to boil. Then put a lid on top, possibly a thicker blanket, and let the jars cool until they reach room temperature. I mention that keeping the jars in the water until they cool is just as important as boiling them itself.
The cooled jars should have the lids slightly pulled down. Now they can be stored in the pantry and will keep perfectly all winter.
The advantage of this method is that the tomato pieces peel off super easily, which is useful for many recipes.
Good luck with canning, my dears!