Kristin Kans: A Tutorial

Yesterday I reached maximum capacity with the tomatoes.

This, my friends, is only the tip of the tomato iceberg.

It was clearly time for drastic action. It was Time To Can.

Step One: Turning the kitchen into a sauna by boiling three pots of water at once.

Back burner=pot of water to sterilize jars and lids. Front left=pot of water for tomatoes, to facilitate peeling. Front right=the big, bad pressure canner.

Step Two: The peeling. To peel tomatoes, you drop them into boiling water (preferably in a nifty little basket so they can all be lifted out at once) for about 30 seconds, then dump them into cold water. This causes the skins to slip off, leaving you with a slippery, slimy, naked tomato.

On the left, the gigantic bowl of cold water for the boiled tomatoes. On the right, the not-quite-so-gigantic colander to wash the worst of the dirt off the tomatoes before peeling. And now you see why a farm sink is so necessary on a farm.

Step Three: Mashing the tomatoes into the jars and putting on the lids and rings. When the tomatoes are peeled, cored, and cut into chunks if they're really big, they get smushed in the jars (along with some citric acid, because my tomatoes weren't very acidic and we do not want to die of botulism). There are no photos of this step, because my hands were completely covered in tomato slime, which I did not wish to get on my camera. But trust me that you really want to jam the tomatoes into the jar. It's cathartic, really. Then the rims of the jars get wiped off (if the top of the jar is dirty, it will impede sealing), the lids plunked on, and the rings tightened.

Step Four: The canning.

Can you believe this monstrous pressure canner only holds seven quarts? What a screw.

I used the pressure canner this time, but tomatoes can be canned with a hot water bath, too. That's how we always used to do it before we got the pressure canner this year.

(Fun, science-y side note: At this point, the temperature in my kitchen was approximately equivalent to the surface of the sun.)

While the tomatoes were doing their thing in the pressure canner, I faced this:

Ew.

There's a photo that will never make it into The Ball Blue Book.

And finally, the end result:

I see chili in my future.

So there you have it--the first of many, many canning days in the next couple of weeks. And by the way, remember that first picture, with the big colander and dish pan both full of tomatoes? Those seven quarts you see there only used the dish pan. I still have the colander full. And the tomatoes keep ripening.