In the most ideal world, you would process all your tomatoes in one weekend. Save the miserable task of heating up the kitchen, burning your fingers and being endlessly on your feet for one or two days where you can wrangle everyone you know into helping, or at least binge-watch an entire season or two of something alone.
If you’re a smart bird, you accomplish this by buying tomatoes all at once. The more self-flagellating among us, the gardeners, are determined to grow the tomatoes too. The ripe ones peter out not over a weekend, but over six weeks. It’s the worst tease, because you have to actually deal with them every few days over that long period. Here’s how to reduce that time so you don’t spend all August over the stove.
Gather and freeze
When tomatoes are ripe, you can throw them into freezer bags, suck out as much air as possible—which can be difficult because of the shape of tomatoes—and freeze them. Defrost when you need them; the upside is they slip right out of the skins when you do.
The downsides are that the tomatoes lose all of their tomato shape; you’re working with mush; and personally, I find the flavor to be a little lacking after the deep freeze. Nevertheless, this is the best way to hold tomatoes until you want to deal with them, if you have the freezer space, and realistically, you were probably going to cook the tomatoes down anyway, so mush works to your advantage.
Process and hold
If I have a decent-enough haul but not enough to can, I’ll peel the tomatoes and roast them, basically get them to the place where I’d otherwise can them, and then throw them in the fridge for a few days until more of the tomatoes are ready to harvest. This is not an indefinite situation—you have a few days—but at the point that you marry these to your other processed tomatoes, you’re boiling the tomatoes and processing them in a hot water bath or pressure canner, and as long as you do so properly, you should be fine.
Pick them green
This is a controversial take, but I stand by it. If you gather your tomatoes green, and then ripen them inside, they all ripen at the same time. Try it with a few to see for yourself. Keep them in a brown bag with a banana, and they will ripen, no matter how green they were. The key is to check them daily, remove the ripe ones, and make sure you’re turning them and giving them fresh air.
Trade them
This is my favorite trick. I have many friends with gardens, and I have often traded my early tomatoes for her late ones. We both benefit by ending up with the right amount of ‘maters to process.
Let it go
Look, I’m a good gardener. I’m a good preserver. I have all the jars. But some years, I stare at the garden and know I just don’t have it in me. In those times, it’s about self preservation over food preservation. Sometimes you just eat the tomatoes with some really good flaky salt. Or you make a wildly indulgent batch of fresh salsa. Sometimes, you toss them into your Instant Pot and make tomato paste because it’s fast and easy. When all else fails, gather the tomatoes in your arms, and offer them to neighbors on their morning walks as if they were apples. It’s OK if the joy the tomatoes bring land on someone else.
