I assume it has to do with difficulty getting the center of a larger jar up to the right temperature, so the center might not get properly sterilized? Just a guess, though.
Oh, please give me a break.
With heavy rains my tomatoes are like water balloons. There is too much cracking and flavor is low. I decided it dry some, which is slow with all the moisture. I dried them on a large skillet and finished the process with a microwave since I didn’t want to wait 24+ hrs with an air dryer. That took about 5 hrs. 1/2 slices went to 1/8 inch and diameter reduced by 50%. One piece was the thickness of a potato chip. The flavor is intense and now I can taste their potential.
1 Like
I wasn’t saying it is justified (I don’t know), but that’s the only reason I could think for them to advise against larger sizes.
The USDA Home Canning Guide: Selecting, Preparing, and Canning Tomatoes and Tomato Products says quarts are fine:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/usda/GUIDE03_HomeCan_rev0715.pdf
Picking that much every third or fourth day. Pictures shown are last couple of harvests. I have 24 plants and so far picked over 100 pounds and still going strong. One thing I only plant tomatoes which are disease and heat tolerance for my area.
8 Likes
Our Ball canning book doesn’t have a recipe for quarts for salsa, just pints. But, it does say quarts are okay for other tomato products like diced, sauce, or juice.
Why do they exclude quarts for salsa? I don’t know, but I prefer to follow their recommendations. Is it unsafe to do quarts, I can’t say. Considering that there’s quite a bit of vinegar in addition to acidic tomatoes, it would seem to be okay, but I’m not going to try it.
Besides, once you open a jar of canned salsa, it needs to be consumed pretty soon, so it’s easier to finish off a pint instead of a quart before it goes bad.
SAUCE waiting to happen!
1 Like
The guide you posted doesn’t recommend quarts for any salsa. It doesn’t specifically say why, but their reason may be because onions and peppers are low acid. So, you might be right in that you can’t get a quart jar with a mixture of low and high acid veggies hot enough.
Always wonder what growers with 20 or more plants are doing the all the tomatoes. Sounds like a full time job. I have a hard time giving mine away from my 7 plants.
2 Likes
Canning! Salsa, diced tomatoes, sauce, ketchup, soup, the possibilities are almost endless…
1 Like
Cooking! A lot of our dishes use tomatoes. I want to try making a tomato tart and Clamato (tomato and clam juice with spices) to make some cocktails.
1 Like
Totally agree. For my family of 3, planting 20 tomato plants like this year is over ambitious. Also, don’t have time to can tomatoes when we have other fruit to can/process.
Have been giving to neighbors and friends.
1 Like
I have the Ball canning book, but I have learned not to blindly follow it. If they do not explain why not to do something or why to do something, I’m going to use my own common sense. I’ll leave it others as to whether or not I have any common sense or not. I’m much too old to lose sleep worrying about that. 
These folks that write these books are no different than us. They develop have their particulars, and we develop ours. If we try a new recipe out of their book without thinking, we are blindly following them.
Do you ever use a recipe out of the blue book after changing it even the slightest bit?
1 Like
I don’t can anything, can’t stand it, sound like a lot of work. I don’t make jam either, sound like a waste of sugar. I prefer to eat them fresh.
Lazy gardener here.
Okay, do what you want, it may not matter. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it either. We water bathed quarts of diced tomatoes this weekend, we used 2 tablespoons of lemon juice per jar, but it was tomatoes only.
My wife said in the past that her mom’s family would water bath green beans, which is a big no-no, but she doesn’t know if anyone got sick from eating such beans.
Break green beans, fill 6,7, or 8 jars (depending on size of your cold pack canner) to within about an inch of the top, add a teaspoon of salt, fill with springwater to cover the beans, place in rack and carefully lower rack into canner full of water.
Place over an outdoor fire (used to use door from an old 1930’s coup as the metal could stand repeated lengthy firings unlike auto doors today) and get fire going. Bring the
canner to a boil, then begin timing. (Preferably using canning instructions more than 30 years old).
Mom’s going on 100, and all us kids are alive from eating 60 to 120 quarts of beans per year preserved in this manner.
As a barefoot boy, it was fun to keep the fire stoked under the water bath canner.
(It made the house much too hot to can beans on the wood fired cook stove in the kitchen!)
1 Like
I freeze immediately from the garden, I mostly grow paste tomatoes and that’s exactly what I make from them. they sit in the freezer until it’s cold outside then I take a portable burner into the greenhouse and cook down the sauce out there, it adds warmth to the greenhouse and makes my paste later in the season when I’m not so tired of tomato harvesting.
oxheart, grape paste, San marzano
6 Likes
It is not a full time job I only water them very very deep once a week and pick them every third or fourth day. Everyone explained good what you can do I add to them I am doing this for so many years and have a plan in place what we do. We use these in almost every meal and most of these will go to our freezer and immediate family members which they wait whole year for these. These are grown in pure compost and taste great. I can not eat store bought tomatoes which taste like cardboard so these will be use all season and in all winter in meals. If your needs are less you can do accordingly but our needs are more so we plant more.
7 Likes
Does Abe Lincoln have an acid bite to it?