Can you preserve/can tomatoes of various sizes together?
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I am new to canning and have a water bath canner. I have successfully (well...I think!) canned/jarred several dozen bread-and-butter pickles following a recipe I found in the official Ball Canning & Preserving Guide.
I am now trying to preserve/can/jar a bunch of my tomatoes following another recipe in the same book. The problem is, all of my tomatoes are drastically different sizes:
Is it generally OK to use the different-sized tomatoes when preserving them? Or do they all need to be the same type and generally same size?
Best Answer
Your intuition is correct here: cannng recipes are developed for a given chunk size (within a small range). If your recipe was developed for large chunks, the small ones will overcook and not taste as well, and if it was for small ones, the large won't heat up enough in the middle and thus it is unsafe.
Your options here are to:
- sort the tomatoes into cans and use different processing times (unless you happen to find two recipes with the same time for large and small tomatoes because of different jar sizes)
- cut up the whole tomatoes until they are roughly the same size as the small ones
- find a recipe for hacked tomatoes and cut up all tomatoes before preserving them.
- use a recipe for large chunks and see if the small ones still taste good enough for your personal standards
Hot water canning tends to be more forgiving than pressure canning, so if you find a recipe specifically intended for hot water canning tomatoes (hint, it will also require acidifying them), it might have a wide size range - you may test it and see if you are OK with the quality of the small chunks.
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Can you blend tomatoes for canning?
This canning tomato sauce method is pretty self-explanatory. Just wash your tomatoes, remove any stems and bad spots, plop them in the blender and blend until smooth. Just long enough to get them all soft and saucy.Do you have to add lemon juice when canning tomatoes?
The following information will help you understand that \u201cyes\u201d you must add lemon juice to your tomatoes and why. It is critical when home canning tomatoes, whether they are whole, crushed or juiced to acidify them during the canning process.Can I preserve whole tomatoes?
Freezing tomatoes is the easiest way to keep ripe tomatoes until you're ready to use them. You don't have to peel them first\u2014in fact, the act of freezing them itself makes the tomatoes insanely easy to peel! \u2014and you can freeze as many or as few at a time as you like.Do you have to cook tomatoes before canning?
Anyone with an excess of ripe tomatoes and the appropriate canning equipment can do it, and whole tomatoes are a perfect introduction to canning. The tomatoes don't need to be boiled more than a minute before being peeled and going into the jars, so there's no real precooking involved.Canning 100 Pounds of Tomatoes with an Italian Pro Cook
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