Preserving A Bumper Tomato Harvest with Freezing vs Canning

Dave's Garden newsletter has an interesting article on preserving the tomato harvest by freezing instead of canning.

Preserving A Bumper Tomato Harvest with Freezing vs Canning

I always recommend safe canning by Ball/Bernardin/USDA/NCHFP recipes. Washed and frozen tomatoes (I also core) can be frozen to make sauces later. I tried dehydrating once but I never used them. I have dehydrated the skins to make powder for cooking flavor.

This summer was mostly a bust. (There's always next year.) I did manage to can (VKP Store steam canner) 2 batches of salsa and one batch of quartered tomatoes.

We froze whole tomatoes in an open topped  supermarket plastic carrier bags 22 pound of them .  They came out as individual red pool balls ..rock hard .The skin slips off them when they are thawed for soups etc  you can't eat them raw after freezing them like this .

 This led me to experiment years ago .  Freeze the surplus tomatoes and then thaw them in batches of 10 pounds to easily remove the skins. Do not attempt to refreeze them; it's dangerous due to the risk of bacteria and toxin growth.

 Now, it costs money to keep excess items frozen ; it occupies space that could be better utilized in the deep chest freezer.
 So I squeezed the thawed toms in to canning jars and pressure canned them . 
Some were whizzed in the food processor then cooked into a thick tomato and onion passata style gunge then got pressure canned in half pint jars  and some were left un-squeezed minus the skins for pressure canning in pint and half pint jars .

 Other than a little pink preserving salt nothing else is needed and once you have a few hundred preserving jars suitable for  pressure canning away you go . ( Mine are Weck jars  ,with rubber sealing rings & thick glass lids  ) . We have frequently eaten three year old pressure canned toms and other veg fruits jams & chutneys  

I must say just going to the big store cupboard and picking out a jar of toms etc. is great ..no waiting for things to thaw out before using them and not much prep time .