Canning Tomato Sauce II

Saturday I was really looking forward to canning tomato sauce: the weather was unseasonably cool, meaning that a vat of boiling water didn't render my kitchen a sweltering sauna.   There was that nip in the air that reminds us that the tomatoes that are so prolific right now won't be available six months from now and opening one of these jars of packed-at-its-peak tomato sauce will be a welcome reminder of summer's bounty.  As I began filling jars with tomato sauce after a good three hours of boiling it down, though, I wasn't exactly looking forward to repeating the whole process the next day with the remaining tomatoes.  But making two separate batches has it's advantages.  The second day I was familiar enough with the process that I didn't have to reread the directions over and over.  Saturday's experience also lent the foresight to plan a dinner that did not require use of the stove top on Sunday. And making two separate batches means that the finished result can serve two separate purposes.

Saturday's batch was a simple tomato sauce: tomatoes, lemon juice and salt.  I will be able to use it in any recipe calling for "one 14 oz can of tomato sauce."  (Yes, I know that a pint is 16 ounces, but for some reason commercial tomato sauce is usually available in 14 ounce cans, so recipes are usually written for that amount.)

Being a tinkerer, Sunday I did a seasoned tomato sauce.  Don't worry, it was from an approved recipe in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving via Home and Garden Dailies.  Seasoned with garlic, onion, oregano, bay leaf, salt, pepper and just enough red pepper flakes to make it zesty, this is the perfect sauce to pour over browned ground beef and serve over spaghetti.

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Twenty pounds of tomatoes yielded 12 pints of tomato sauce (seven of the plain batch and five of the  seasoned batch, which I cooked down longer for a thicker finished product).  Was it worth it?  Since I already had the jars and rings, and the lids were on sale for $2 (lids should be brand new to ensure a proper seal), my total output was $22.  That's less than $2 per pint.  Sure, I could probably find generic tomato sauce in the supermarket cheaper, but I like to think that the quality of a homemade sauce is closer to that of, say, Muir Glen Organics Tomatoes, which I always feel like I am paying an arm and a leg for.  But when you experience all the time and the sheer bulk of tomatoes (almost a full pound per pint of finished sauce) that go into a can of tomato sauce, the price you pay for good quality seems justified.

And in midwinter, be assured I'm not going to waste any of these jars of sauce on some Super Saver Value-Pack ground beef.  No, this is quality sauce, and anything that accompanies this sauce in a meal is going to have to 'step up to the plate' so to speak. Something about making my own, about knowing from whence my food came, about putting so much time into a sauce, inspires me to prepare a meal to be savored.  And for me, savoring a meal means savoring life.

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Food safety is serious business.  Because it is so important to use an approved recipe when canning, at this time I have opted not to post "adapted" versions.  Links to the recipes I use are available in the post.  If you haven't canned before, and are considering it, but you aren't committed enough to the idea to buy a book,  The National Center for Food Preservation's website has all the information that you'll need, and it is kept up-to-date.  Also, while it would feel pleasantly quaint to use Grandma's recipe for Tomato Sauce, but I must advise against it.  This is an area where you want up-to-date resources.

Canning Tomato Sauce

Step 1:  Find a dish soap that you enjoy the fragrance of...

Yes, that should be the first step to all canning recipes, because at the end of the day when ginger-vinegar essence of chutney is just a memory, that Ivory dish soap will be fresh in your mind. 

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ALWAYS use canning recipes from reputable sources.  The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a good online resource for safe canning.  (Their recipe for Standard Tomato Sauce is what I used today.)  I've made a handful of recipes from their site all with more than satisfactory results. You know I like to tinker and adjust recipes, but this is NOT the time to do it.  ALWAYS stick to the recipe when canning to ensure a safe end result. A safe product relies on the right acid and/or sugar  level, so stick with commercially packaged lemon juice or the specific type of vinegar called for in the recipe, and do not reduce or exchange the quantities of sweeteners or fruits. 

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Honestly, I thought I was going to use "having an active toddler" as a reasonable excuse not to do any canning this summer.   I mean millions of people live as if there's some sort of outlet just miles from their home that contains virtually every imaginable food for purchase...  But I've read the literature, I've watched the documentaries, I've tasted and I've seen, and it's just gotten in my blood: this sense that we must 'put up' preserves for winter, this joyful satisfaction in investing in the local food system.  And today it got the better of me; I came home from the farmer's market with a 20-lb box of San Marzano tomatoes that my former biology teacher had grown on his one-acre farm in Durham. 

Chicoans, have you visited his stand at the Saturday Market?  I used to avoid it, simply because he and I didn't see eye-to-eye on so many issues so long ago.  I hated biology, but botany's kinda cool.  And fruits and vegetables, that's botany, so maybe we'll find some common ground after-all.  I do enjoy his stand, because he seems to have things that other stands don't.  He has a good selection of herbs, for instance, and long swirly summer squash. Last fall and winter he sold dried fruits and dried chiles.  And he was the first vendor to have pears this year. Today he had some beautiful figs, all sorts of peppers, and about four or five varieties of tomato.  I really appreciate his passion and knowledge about the varieties that he grows.  He seems like an okay guy after all.

I had done my research online:  21 pounds of tomatoes should yield 9 pints of thin tomato sauce.  Twenty eight pounds would yield 9 pints of a thick tomato sauce. I had considered buying 25 pounds, but the vendor already had the tomatoes measured in 20-pound quantities, and twenty pounds is a large box, so I got 20 pounds. 

This would be an appropriate use for your largest stockpot, if it hadn't been sacrificed years ago in a cross-country move...  So I used my large spaghetti pot. I scrubbed it out, because the last time I made yogurt the milk scum had kind of browned and hardened on to the bottom of the pan.  I'd washed it a couple times since then, but man was that stuff stuck on!  For canning everything must be super-clean, so I scrubbed and scrubbed and finally it was shiny and clean.  

I started chopping tomatoes.   The recipe I was referencing advised that I should chop up about a pound of tomatoes and get them boiling in the pot, and then continue quartering and adding tomatoes at a rate so as to allow the pot to continue boiling.  Simple enough. I liken this step to knitting.  I don't knit personally, but a lot of people seem to find the repetitive motion somewhat therapeutic. Otherwise, why would one spend a week or more making something they could go buy at the outlet down the street?  So it is with chopping tomatoes and stirring pots of steamy vegetable mixtures.  It's relaxing.  After about a half hour or so of this therapy, the pot was bubbling about an inch from the rim.  It was time to let it boil and reduce to the desired consistency.  Time for my second round of dishes: washing the cutting board and knife, the glass jars and lids, and for good measure, all the parts of the fruit and vegetable strainer attachment to my KitchenAid mixer.

Then time to wait, and stir or crush the tomatoes occasionally. And wait.  And wait.  I really hadn't expected it to be over two hours of cooking.  Finally the tomatoes had reduced by about a third.  Oh, and did I mention that I had only used half of my 20-pound box of tomatoes?  Meaning that I am anticipating a repeat performance tomorrow. At this point I assembled the fruit and vegetable strainer attachment.  Then I searched my cupboards for a big vessel to catch the sauce.  Using a ladle, I scooped the cooked tomatoes into the food tray, and pushed them into the grinder (thanking God all the while for my mother-in-law who so kindly gave me the attachment.  If you've ever strained berries or apricots for jam by hand, you know what I am talking about!)  A thin puree came out the other end. I strained all 4 1/2 quarts of the tomatoes and determined that more reduction was necessary.  I poured the hot strained tomato sauce back into the original (washed) pot and let it bubble away another hour while I washed all the KitchenAid parts, heated the canning kettle and got started making dinner.  

I reduced the puree to what ended up being seven pints (three and a half quarts).  The consistency would have been thicker and more satisfactory if I had let to boil longer, but my patience was getting thin and I needed that burner to finish making dinner.  At this point the rest is easy; well, one could get some pretty significant burns, but in terms of clean-up, all one has left to wash is the stockpot, ladle, tongs and spoon rest. 

This is where having the right canning equipment is imperative.  A jar lifter, a magnetic lid wand, a wide-mouth funnel and long heatproof gloves are all a worthwhile investment if you plan to can more than once. And it is at this point in the process that I always wonder why I've failed to make that investment.  I use some good tongs, a small funnel and rubber gloves and I get through it:  filling hot jars with a tablespoon of commercially prepared lemon juice, a teaspoon of canning salt and finally the tomato sauce. Then I carefully place the seven hot pints into the hot water canner.

One last load of dishes and the work is done.  Yes, once the water is boiling again, the jars need to be timed to bathe for 35 minutes and then removed (without scalding oneself), but that's hardly any work at all...

Photo credit:  Jason Powers Photography 

Nutritional Philosophy + Mango Salsa

Do you give much thought to your nutritional philosophy?

A while back a friend of mine commented that he'd rather his kids be picky eaters than "little pigs who eat everything."  His point was that he'd rather his kids develop a nutritional philosophy and figure out what they like and don't like and why.   So often we complain about picky eaters.  I found my friend's sentiment so refreshing that it has stuck with me for a good ten years. Of course, it probably helped that this friend and I shared a mutual disdain for mayonnaise and that he made excellent tri-tip.
(By the way, my practice is not to use names when I talk about friends, but if you catch me writing about you, and leave a comment on that post, I'll give you extra credit.)

Here's the rundown on my current Nutritional Philosophy.  I hope you feel no pressure to share my beliefs about food, because frankly, some of them may be unfounded.  I just want to be clear, so that you know what to expect from me.

I really love the loca-vore mentality.  (Isn't it funny that spellcheck doesn't recognize that word?  Hasn't it been in the vernacular for, what, five years?)  After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, our household was about 70% locavore.  We bought almost all of our produce and eggs at the farmers market.  All our beef was from Chaffin Orchards in Oroville.  I craved Shredded Pork six months before I found the right cut locally.  The main things we ate that came from more than about 100 miles away were coffee, sugar, flours, pastas, breakfast cereals, dairy products and the occasional yellow onion or avocado. (Isn't it odd that Glenn County has so many dairies, and yet, the most 'local' milk available in our area in from Marin County?  It's wonderful stuff, by the way, and we used it exclusively for at least a few months, but...

But you know what?  I missed cilantro. It has such a short growing season here that I suffered through an entire summer with no 'perfect' homemade salsa.  (Cilantro is what makes it perfect for me.)

Then our food budget got tighter.  And, yes, I do believe that it is less expensive for society in the long run to rely on local food systems, but we had to make some compromises.   Especially after I burned two $16 pasture-raised chickens in the course of a month.

And I missed shrimp.  And salmon.  And mango.

So after about a year, we made some adjustments:

I still buy most of my produce at the Farmer's Market, because I really value the agricultural land that it supports, and I value the farmers who make a living from the land. I value the security of knowing where my food comes from and that it is less likely to be tainted with salmonella than all that stuff in the grocery store that goes through essentially the same processing plants as all the stuff in all the other grocery stores.  That said, if something is not available locally, I don't feel guilty about buying it.

I prefer organic milk, but if I find that I must buy non-organic, I make sure to choose the stuff without rBST.  I understand that the living conditions of those cows that provide the national brand organic milk probably aren't much better than the conventional cows, but still, I buy organic when I can.  And I don't buy ultra-pastuerized.  I like Tillamook Cheese.  It's not organic, but it is from Oregon and I think they do a good job of knowing where their milk comes from.  I imagine farmers in the co-operative get compensated more fairly than those whose milk is purchased to make generic brands of cheese.

In recipes calling for sugar, I use organic evaporated cane juice.  Oddly, I use regular old brown sugar in recipes calling from brown sugar.  I buy local honey either at the farmer's market or at the natural foods store, and well, sometimes from the bulk section at Win-co.  I don't keep very much on hand, because it seems to disappear fast.

I buy eggs from Chris' Egg Farm at the Farmer's Market.  Every so often, I end up buying conventional eggs at the grocery store, and I am getting past the feeling that I am poisoning my family with them, but I don't think I will ever trust them. Besides, Farmer Chris is very entertaining.

There are a lot of rice producers locally, but sometimes I buy jasmine rice or sushi rice at Trader Joe's.

I prefer fish over meat.  Seafood obviously isn't a local food in inland California, but that's okay with me.  Meat is a difficult thing for me.  I don't buy it at big grocer's.  Well, I have purchased it at Costco, but I prefer local butchers, even if the meat isn't sourced locally.  And I have been known to pick up a package of bacon at Trader Joe's. In an ideal world, I'd feed my family only locally raised, grass-finished beef and locally raised chickens and pork.

Speaking of Trader Joe's, after much thought, I've decided that I like that place.  Yes, they are highly secretive about some of their sourcing and management.  Yes, their pre-packaged produce isn't very 'green,' but they've raised the culinary awareness of many Americans, made organic products more accessible to us, and you can trust that nothing in their store has artificial flavorings or preservatives.

Well, I think that covers my Nutritional Philosophy, at least regarding food sources. What is your nutritional philosophy?

Mango Salsa
I learned this recipe from my father-in-law.  He serves it over carne asada in corn tortillas.  You could serve it with chips. 

1 white onion
6 poblano peppers
6 firm-ripe mangoes, or 1 container (12 oz ?) mango chunks from the pre-packaged produce section
large handful of cilantro
salt and lime juice to taste.

Slice onion into 1/2 inch rings. Leave rings intact and grill over medium-high heat to soften and just barely char.  Char peppers over grill.  Let vegetables cool.

Remove skin and seeds from peppers.  Chop peppers and onions into a 1/2 inch dice. Chop mango into 3/4 inch dice.  Chop cilantro.  Combine ingredients.  Season with salt and lime juice.  Let flavors marry 15 minutes or so before serving.


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And for those of keeping score at home:  My goal was to make dinner five nights in a row this week, but  tonight we didn't do dinner at home.  We went to a friend's house instead.  And that's ok with me!  Tomorrow night, though, Chiles Rellenos!