25 lb garden of mix Amish paste and Roma tomatoes plus fresh spices in a 18 quart roasting pan. Then in a couple of days and with wife’s 
, you have 19 pints of homemade ketchup 
Haven’t bought ketchup since she made her first batch
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What if I perfer this thread being in the lounge? Is it OK to leave here?
Thanks
My neighbor and i have been discussing roasting some…then canning them… She is a much better tomato grower than me.
Sounds yummy on paper.
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I miss growing tomatoes but they hate cold feet and I’m in Alaska. I have been meaning to play with grafting tomatoes to potato roots; most do it for the novelty but to me it may be key for growing them outdoors. Plus I would get potatoes so win/win.
My favorite way to preserve them was dehydrated and then into tomato powder. Depending on the amount of water you could reconstitute into either sauce or tomato paste. They could last a looooong time with 0 loss in quality, and it would take a mountain of tomatoes to fill a half gallon mason jar.
My wife does tomato powder also. Although it should be called tomato POWER. A little goes a LONG way.
You should get yourself a proper dehydrator, best tool ever for preservation. I forage for fun and profit so I have two large units. It makes it super efficient to process an entire harvest. Load, set the temp, set the time, and go to bed.
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@krismoriah … roasting your tomatoes onion garlic, celery, carrots (what ever veggies you include) … makes the very best tomato soup.
Add fresh chopped basil and heavy whipping cream once all your veggies are blended.
Mmmmmm Good.
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I run my dehydrator in winter in the hoophouse. it keeps it warm in there. I run an outdoor high rated extension from the house for it. same with canning
fresh stuff goes directly into the freezer until it’s cold out, then I’ll do my preserving out there. I spent January with a portable stove burner and the pressure canner out there making tomato sauces. and my dehydrator drying the rest
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One technique I think is under appreciated is concentrating fruits until they are shelf stable. In America, cider syrup and apple butter were very common in the old days and preceded canning. I have apple butter that is 8 years old and none of my cider syrup or apple butter have ever shown any signs of spoilage, even stored in a room that sometimes gets to 100+ f and is commonly in the 90’s in the summer. When I posted my videos and blog post on making tradtional apple butter, many people commented that similar products are made with different fruits all over the world. If the sugar content is high enough, they won’t mold. Acids may play some roll as well, I’m not sure about that. In Holland they make something called applestroop, which is just juice, but cooked down to where it is a spread. Another product made in America was called apple cheese, which I assume is the same as apple butter, but cooked down to a more solid consistency. The jist is that with sweet fruit, you can cook down either pure juice or a combination of fruit solids and Juice until it will keep at room temperature without heat canning. These products can allegedly last for decades. The advantages are many, no heat canning process, no money spent on new seals, no need to finish once it is opened. I’m pretty sure that tomato paste was made and used the same way and preceeds heat canning.
Apple Butter Video
https://youtu.be/thf6AmL_G4A
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NICE and Thank You very much for sharing the video. You already know this but food preservation was common knowledge back then. You are trying to relearn those methods back into today’s day and age. I find your effort to be a awesome undertaking 
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Fruits preserved in sugar /honey can last for a long time. This was a batch of 2021 peach I preserved in a jar at room temperature with some purple perilla leaves. Now I take them out of the jar and further dry them so I can eat them as snack.
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a little acid and then a long cook down makes really good jam, at worst, and excellent fruit butter, at best. it’s very concentrated so the flavors come forward. I love apple butter, I grew up in pa where it’s common to find it at the farmer market
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No spray pears
Recipe
2 hour roast
Food mill
Pear Sauce, Ingredients: Pears
18 pints out of water bathers. Still Ingredients: Pears
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We have a dehydrator, my wife just made garlic powder with it. I like to use it to make jerky, leg of lamb jerky is the best
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Never had lamb jerky. Lamb is too expensive to make it into jerky. Good to know it taste good.
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I process my tomatoes in the slow cooker too. Do you cook with skins? I blanch off skins but keep seeds.
Im able to salvage my roma tomatoes this year, too watery to slice but ok to cook. I have them blanched/frozen ready for sauce cooking when its NOT 87 f lol.
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Jerky out of left over leg of lamb is a good way to waste any.
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Too many projects underway this year, but cousin Shari and I got 52 pints of salsa canned today. This is probably if for me this year, I’m still well stocked with bread and butter pickles.
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I wish I could grow tomatoes here but the ground is too cold for their taste. I have been meaning to graft some into potato roots to see if they’ll be happier that way
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Made apple butter for the first time yesterday and managed to squeeze about 40 apples of this size into these few jars and a bit of leftover for tasting.
I used Gravenstein, Rubín and an old unknown variety which has a very rich and strong lavour, lots of sugar and acid, so I did not add any extra juice.
I cheated the long process by grating the cleaned quarters and then juicing it through a mesh colander and reducing the juice to about a third before adding the pulp back in and reducing more.
When it gets a bit cooler, I’ll open the jars and bake them on lower heat in the oven to get the bubbles out and to create a leathery skin on top.
This is a method that we use in CE for storing povidla (almost black prune butter) which would create a sort of a seal to make it even more moisture resistant. My grandmother used to add a spoon of slivovica on top in hope that the alcohol would make it last even longer adding “you know, Táňa, it doesn’t hurt the flavour, either”.
It looks like we will have a decent crop of wild prunes or Hauszwetchke, so I’ll be making povidla next. The traditional hack there is to bake the prunes before cooking them into the thick black-brown paste. This helps to break down the flesh and evaporate a lot of moisture.
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