Processing Tomatoes at Home - From Picking to Powder

Quart jars of homemade tomato sauce cooling on a cutting board, with a cone strainer resting beside them.

9.4.25
by: Jill@321Oak
Pennsylvania, USA

Processing Tomatoes at Home

Video: https://youtu.be/mcQH0LguRhc

TL;DR: Simple Tomatoes Recipe (Juice, Sauce or Paste)

We use a ton of tomato products every year. Tomato juice, sauce, paste, pasta sauces, enchilada sauces, soups and stews, and delicious beans; one way or another, we use some kind of tomato product every week in our home kitchen.

As I ease into my retirement (and my new life with a big lot in rural Pennsylvania), I’m learning to put them up myself. We planted six plants this year, including a couple of little ones (cherries and grapes), a couple of → Cherokee Purples (heirloom), and an Amish Paste. I’ve been growing tomatoes for years, but this is our best harvest yet, primarily because I have time to get out and pick them.

While I’ll process a lot of our own harvest, it’s not nearly enough. I’ll also buy some half-bushel flats at the market, and we’ll also continue to use store-bought canned tomatoes as needed. Tomatoes are a great place to start your home canning journey. I do it because it’s fun, and I like learning, and I like having → a stocked pantry of home-canned food.

My Tomato-Processing Workflow

As I do, I’ve developed a process. I like it for several reasons:

  1. I almost never do it all in one day. My process has logical stopping points after each stage. Usually I’ll pick one day, clean and stage the next, make juice the next, and can and make sauce in the same day. I don’t have to, though! I can wait a few days with the sauce in the fridge, or as long as I want with it in the freezer.
  2. Most tomato processing methods include some combination of peeling and straining that is a ton of work. My choice of blending whole tomatoes and straining in my applesauce maker is the simplest I’ve seen.
  3. Because it’s all just pure tomatoes, I don’t have to worry about ratios; there’s no weighing or measuring things out. So I don’t have to do any recipe math if I happen to have 0.69% of the weight or volume of tomatoes that the recipe calls for.
  4. Because the end product is so simple, it’s also incredibly versatile. I can use this in any kind of recipe from Italian pasta sauce to a Mexican red enchilada sauce to an Indian curry. Someday, when I already have 52 quarts of simple tomato sauce on my shelf, then maybe I’ll branch out.

Picking, Cleaning, and Staging Tomatoes

  1. Pick: When I pick, I’ll get all the tomatoes that are ripe and any that look like they’re halfway or more to the right color.
  2. Wash: I toss them in a sink full of cold water and a tiny bit of dish soap.
  3. Gather: If I have a bucket of already picked and washed tomatoes that were staged for ripening, they get tossed in the sink too.
  4. Sort: I rinse them and set them to dry in four groups: slicing, ready to process, needs more time, and compost.
    • Slicing: The best-looking get set out on the counter for sandwiches, salads, and general household use. If there are any still here from last week, I move them into the ready-to-process group.
    • Ready to process: ripe tomatoes, ready to be made into juice.
    • Needs more time: not ripe. These get dried, then go in a bucket with a strainer in the bottom (for airflow). They’ll get a retry next week.
    • Compost: there are always a few that get by my filter in the garden, so any that are soft, rotting, or otherwise not edible go in the compost.

Tomato Juice and Sauce

First Steps

  1. Core: this is just taking out the spot where the stem connected. I don’t go deep; I just use a little strawberry huller to do it.
  2. Blend: I don’t seed or peel; whole tomatoes go straight into the blender and get whipped into juice.
  3. Strain: I love my stand-up applesauce strainer for this. I got mine at a thrift store, but I’ll try to find a link to one for you. This is an absolutely brilliant new part of my process; I used to strain in a more conventional strainer. It took forever and made a huge mess.

Tomato Juice

As soon as it’s strained, it’s tomato juice. I rarely leave it at this stage, but if you use a lot of juice instead of sauce, you certainly could! From here, it will store in your fridge for a week or so, your freezer for a year or so, and, if you can it, it will store for a few decades or so.

Tomato juice can have a lot of water in it; if you leave it for a day or more, it will settle out, and you’ll have a red layer on top and an amber, clear liquid at the bottom. It’s totally fine and normal; just shake it up and it’s right where it started.

Tomato Sauce

To move from juice to sauce, get a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Any pan will work, but a thin-bottomed pan may need more stirring. Add all your juice and note the level of liquid. With the lid on, bring the juice to a rolling boil, reduce to a fast simmer, and let it cook until the volume is reduced by half. So, if you have 6 quarts of juice, you’ll keep boiling until you have 3 quarts left. Stir occasionally and scrape down the sides of the pan.

As soon as it’s reduced, you have sauce. You can store it any way you like. I can mine. I’m at sea level, and I pressure can tomato sauce for 30 minutes.

Tomato Paste

Something I’m interested in, but have not yet done, is to move it to the next stage, which is tomato paste. The recipes I have say to boil the sauce until it’s reduced by half again, then put it in a wide, shallow baking dish (like a casserole dish), and dehydrate it in the oven at 270°F for many hours, stirring every hour at first and more frequently as it gets thick.

While I think this process sounds interesting, I’m not sure it’s super useful for a home cook. It’s too thick to can, and my freezer space is too precious. Also, store-bought tomato paste is just fine, pretty cheap, and doesn’t take a week of my labor to produce. I’ll probably try it just for the fun of it at some point, if only to get to the tomato powder option below.

Tomato Powder

Lots of people who skin their tomatoes dry the skin and turn it into powder, but I’m interested in trying to go from paste to powder. I have tomato powder for my homemade backpacking meals, and it would be interesting to see if I could do it myself.

This would mean taking tomato paste, spreading it thinly on silicone mats, dehydrating it for many more hours, and then breaking it up and grinding it to a smooth powder in a spice mill or food processor.

Cooking with Homemade Tomato Sauce and Paste

I use tomato sauce and paste all the time. As I get more recipes added to this site, I’ll begin to cross-reference them all here. Just one quick note before I go: I purposely can just tomatoes (not pasta sauce); I don’t add basil or sugar, or even salt. These will be used as an ingredient in a final dish, not by themselves.

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