If you are in a position to look at a device to help you make tomato paste or sauce, seed different fruits and remove skins, do I have some advice for you! I have made paste from tomatoes before. I used to own a Foley food mill and used it regularly. (Like an original Foley food mill, from the seventies. The only difference between my old one and the newer ones was the old Foley mill was built like a tank and new ones are made in China.)
If you are going to make tomato aspic for dinner, or you just need to run whatever you have through a sieve, in small amounts, a food mill will help out a lot.
However, if you are going through a ton of fruit and you don't want to get seriously frustrated: then buying a hand crank or electric food seive is a much better choice. Mine is a Johnny Applesauce Maker I recommend this product both for build quality and price point. PS don't run this dry. You'll mess up the seive.
Off to the races!
You can use a food mill on a giant amount of produce. A mill would be better than using a food processor, because tomato seeds will ruin the final flavor of whatever you are making and the processor will whip air into the sauce. You can seed and skin by hand, but my saucer isn't made for separating cooked tomatoes.
This worked really well. Not a lot of effort. Most of the effort was smashing the quartered tomatoes down into the spiral that crushes them.
I don't want to sit and seed and parboil the skins off of over twenty pounds of fruit. Plus, the food seive I bought recommends quartering fresh tomatoes and just running them through. No cooking: no little "x" in the bottom of your tomato and dropping it in boiling water and then ice water. No prep at all, really, other than quartering. I did not buy the automatic motor for this, although I may do that at some point.
As I went: I would clean off the chute a little, move the bowl I was catching the sauce in and dump the bowl of tomato puree into the big enamel kettle I'm using to reduce it. I am working with about half the tomatoes. The other half aren't ripe yet.
The best thing about this contraption is that I can run pomegranate arils through it, if I don't like the citrus juicer I bought for that job.
I'm so frustrated with pomegranates. I mean: yes, there are better ways to cut and open them than others, but if you are talking about fifty or so fruit: nothing is simple with pomegranates. To the point: that I may kill the out of control pomegranate bush I have, and put something else in. Then I'd just buy my pomegranate juice from the grocery store. It's definitely a PITA fruit.
This is a big pot. It made a good amount of sauce. Now I'm just reducing it to paste.
Anyway, back to the crank seive. I have a decent harvest of tomatoes for the first time, in the twelve years I've been growing in Texas. I'm going to make tomato paste. I may cook it down and decide to freeze it in ice trays and have freshly frozen tomato paste that's already preportioned for cooking.
The amount it's reduced over two days on the lowest setting on my stove. I'm about to go out of town so I will freeze this and process the next batch of tomatoes when I get home. Then I plan to can some. I have too much paste to freeze all of it.
I thought about canning the paste after I reduced it, but currently: my son has had a 103° fever for three days and I am catching it. I really don't have the energy to can anything right now. In fact, I'm in bed at the moment. Freezing is the clear winner today.
If you are going to use a tomato seive, put a long dish underneath the machine to catch the juice that will leak out. Otherwise: it'll get on your counter, and these all leak a little. I have an enamel sauce pot I will be dumping the bowl into. The bowl is under the sauce chute.
Here's the recipe for the paste:
(This recipe is for freezing.)
Quarter your fresh tomatoes and place in a container next to the seive.
Put the quarters in the hopper and feed them through the seive. Add all of the puree into a non reactive piece of cookware, like enamelware. (Do not use anything aluminum!) You can dehydrate and powder the skins and seeds and use that as a spice to add some tomato flavor to dishes, or: toss it in the compost.
Add one bay leaf for every 2 pounds of tomatoes. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to low. You can add other spices but I like to have a more versatile end product by waiting to add the spices when I cook with the paste. Stir the sauce occasionally. I cook mine overnight and most of a day to remove the excess water. Obviously I don't watch it through the night, but that's because I start at night. It only needs to be watched after most of the the moisture is gone. Reduce the tomato sauce to a paste that will stand on a spoon and not puddle or run off. The thicker the paste gets, the lower the heat needs to be. You should have something thick in the end, and at that point: be on the lowest heat setting you have on your stove. Remove the bay leaves and discard.
For freezing: Let the paste come to room temperature.
Either: spoon the paste onto cooking sheets with a piece of parchment paper on each to easily remove the blobs of paste post freezing. Make each blob of paste about a tablespoon or two. Or: add the cooled paste to an ice tray. Add two or three tablespoons of paste to each cube in the tray. Freeze.
You can store all of the frozen paste cubes in a gallon sized Ziploc, and add them as you need them, per your recipes. If you'd rather can these: there are many recipes online. Pressure canning is ideal. The short cooking time and high pressure ensures the flavor is at its peak. Most canning recipes add salt and citric acid.
There you go. Fresh, ripe, homegrown tomato paste. Definitely worth the effort!
Meet you out in the garden to swap recipes we can use our tomato paste in!
Crazy Green Thumbs
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