Best Tools for Canning Tomatoes

In this episode of the Perfectly Preserved Podcast, Master Food Preservers Anna and Jenny discuss all the tools that make preserving the uber versatile tomato easier. We also discuss peeling tomatoes as well as peaches, and share some encouragement for a younger canner. 

Hand food mill - Oxo brand

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Perfectly Preserved Podcast. I'm your host Jenny Gomes. And I'm Anna Cash. Here we come together to bring you a podcast all about preserving food safely, easily, and dare I say, perfectly. At home. We are master food preservers moms wives, and we love talking about canning. ready to can like a master preserver. Let's get into today's episode.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 0:26

Welcome back to another episode of The Perfectly Preserved Podcast. I'm Anna here with my co-host, Jenny. we are going to be talking to you today about the best tools for tomato processing. Tomatoes are the most canned product in the United States, and so it's important that we cover some of the tools that you might use for that. It's going to be a really great episode, so stay tuned. For those of you that are new to the podcast, welcome, we always want. A rating and review. So if you have not done that, please do for the first time ever, we are also on YouTube, so check us out there. Perfectly preserved, and let's get started. Jenny, what do we have in this episode today?

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 1:07

Okay, so you said so. Correctly that tomatoes are the most commonly canned food in America, which is amazing. And it's very interesting because they're not the easiest, that's not to discourage you or to say that they're hard, but they do have a few ins and outs. If you're brand new to canning and new to. Tomatoes. we do have a couple episodes at the beginning of our season one that you should check out. That's all things, canning tomatoes, all about proper acidification. Good recipes to try and just a really great primer at the beginning of our season one, I think, all about tomatoes, so you can definitely check that out if you're brand new. But in this episode we wanna talk about the tools that make tomatoes easier. I think too, there's several things that we're gonna cover that will just give you options for both peeling coring and then however you want to work up those tomatoes so that they are useful to you when you are opening the jar. the whole progression is really important that you think about what do I want at the end result that will be the most useful to me. I always think it's interesting to talk to people that have been canning a while and hear so what is the thing you can with your tomatoes? Do you do tomato sauce? Some people drill down and make enchilada sauce and tomato pasta sauce and make many different, very similar but differently seasoned tomato products. I think that's very interesting. So Anna, tell us what do you can. In your tomatoes, and then we'll dive into the tools.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 2:39

Oh, okay. I love this question. In the beginning, I also did a lot of different tomato products. I did enchilada sauce, I did marinara, I did tomato sauce, tomato paste. And what I've learned over the years is that. I like having really two, maybe three major tomato products in my pantry, and then I work off of that. So number one is salsa number two is diced tomatoes, and number three is a tomato sauce. So with those three, I can pretty much make any type of cooked tomato product that I want. I usually do. Oh, I would say probably 50 pints of diced tomatoes, just because we use them all the I use them, strain them and I use that as actually my pizza sauce Just a straight canned diced tomato. And then obviously salsa for eating and tomato sauce for, pasta dishes. So what about you, Jenny? What do you, what tomato products do you can.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 3:43

So I do, I can zero tomato salsa. My husband really likes a fresh tomato salsa. I have canned a very good salsa verde, which is made with eos, so that's does not apply for this episode at all. But I make, I call it easy tomato sauce. So it's a pretty basic, not super thick. A lot of people spend a lot of time cooking their down, so it's super thick and I leave mine fairly thin. Tomato sauce. And I would say that is the vast majority I do can some marinara sauce. And that is a recipe that I have in my cookbook, the Pressure Canning Cookbook, but it's based very closely off of two different tested recipes. So that's a sauce that has ground meat in it as well as tomato. But those are, I find like just as simple tomato sauce is the most useful for me. Then I can always open the jar up and then make it be the thing I need it to be. And because you've done all the work of peeling and cooking and chopping and all that, it's very easy to turn it into tomato, pasta sauce or very easy to turn it into your pizza sauce. Very simple. So that's how I do it. But, and I think it's cool. People out there do, like we said, like enchilada sauce or like hot sauce, they make all the different. Little specific niche tomato sauces, and that's cool too. Just as long as you're using a tested recipe, knock yourself out, and that's how you find things your family will love. So knock yourself out. Anna, let's start with the beginning of our tool list for preserving tomatoes. So first part is sometimes the hardest. Peeling. What is your method or what tools do we have for peeling those tomatoes? You have the best tip of all. Everybody get a pencil.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 5:28

It's out of laziness and exhaustion. At the end of the summer, I have this, you pick farm, really close by me, and at the beginning of October, they shut off the water to the tomato fields and they let you come and glean tomatoes. And so I gather a group of friends. We go and pick tomatoes that are either red or green. And we donate half to the food bank, and then we bring the other half home. And by October I am usually burned out. I am exhausted, so I end up washing whatever Red tomatoes we have. And then just putting them in Ziploc bags and throwing them in my freezer, kicking that can down the road. And then when I want to use tomatoes or make something with tomatoes, I pull the bag out and let it thaw in the sink. And magically when those unthaw, the skins just slip right off and there's no boiling, there's no cutting xs in the bottom of the tomatoes. You just slip those skins right off.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 6:28

Amazing. So to be super clear, Anna just freezes the whole tomato, the whole thing without doing anything to it other than watching it off. You freeze them and then they're round little globes and then. When you're ready to work them up, either cook them fresh or can them, or whatever you wanna do with them. Then you let'em defrost a little bit, the skin slide right off. Just pull'em off like a beanie, a little hat, blo, and then they're ready to go. That's incredible. After Anna told me this I applied the same tactic to whole peaches. So this is not a peach episode, but here's a peach tip. You can do the same two peaches and I did this last summer or excuse me, the summer before and this last, this, what I did the summer before lasted me a whole year. My dad has one peach tree, literally 100 years old, and it had so many peaches. It was breaking branches and he called and he was like, I got some peaches for you. So I just go over there thinking I'm gonna get a box of peaches. No, I had a car full of peaches. And like Anna said,

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 7:33

no.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 7:33

sometimes that's all you've got is just, you know, just a little bit of, any wits left. And so I just put them all in the chest freezer, just a whole. And then I'm such a creature of habit. I had a three peach smoothie every day for lunch. Almost every single day of the year. I had three peach smoothie. So it was three peaches I'd get out and then 15 minutes later they'd be soft enough to just slide the skins off. And I would just slice them off the pit, kinda like the way you would cut an apple.'cause it was still pretty frozen. Right. And I put the peach chunks in my blender, a scoop of vanilla protein powder and milk. And then I'd put it in a jar and head to town.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 8:08

Yum.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 8:08

Well, yum. But also very handy. So that is Anna and I, I would suggest that is a very good way to get over the problem of how to peel. Anna, what do you do if you aren't, let's say you can't freeze them or don't freeze them How is like the normal way of peeling a tomato?

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 8:29

Yeah, the standard way that people peel tomatoes is to use a sharp knife and cut an X in the bottom, and then toss those fresh tomatoes in boiling water. Blanch them and then take them out and put them in an ice bath and then you can slip the skins that way. The problem is, is that method when it's a hundred degrees outside is probably as close to hell as I would imagine hell is, is having to like grab hot tomatoes and try and get the skin off

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 8:59

Yeah.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 8:59

you're also boiling other tomatoes. Like it's just, it's too much. But that's traditionally what they recommend in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and the USDA's website. There's still plenty of recipes out there doing that, but I think people are getting wise to the fact that method kind of sucks. You can do it, but it just kind of sucks.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 9:19

Yeah and by sucks we mean it sucks for you. The end result is great, but it's just like it takes, I hate it because it takes. Kind of a long time. It's very hard for me personally to keep all that moisture in the pot. I feel like I'm splashing. You get tomato water all over your universe,

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 9:45

Yes.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 9:46

it's very hard and it's kind of like horribly slow. So if you were to drop into a boiling water bath, one tomato, well then that'll be blanched in about 30 seconds. Then you have to go one by one. And if you are like me, you wanna put 25 in there because it's let's get this party started, let's go. But then it takes so long, then you don't know which ones are done. You're pulling up with a slotted spoon. There's just no way to make it faster or less awful. And I tried really hard to find one, and I feel confident in saying that it's just a very tedious and messy step. and then waiting till they're cool enough to slide the skins off. Of course you're gonna try and do it too soon and you'll burn your fingers and feel annoyed. And then what do you do with these scalding hot skins? They're also leaking tomato water. I mean, it's fine to do. And maybe you don't hate it. Maybe you're like, great, I'm happy to do this. Great. Do it. But. For me personally, as Anna aptly said, it is a hellish procedure and it makes the whole thing, oh, there's another thing when you process tomatoes, okay, let's say this is your very first time canning tomatoes. For the processing time or the time that the tomato sauce has to be in the jar is longer than, let's say raspberry jam. it's like fairly long. Okay? 25 minutes as opposed to 10 minutes, or probably longer. Really it's longer, so it just makes your whole day, your whole thing is just going to be longer. So that's what we recommend for peeling Anna, tell us about the tool that you love for coring.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 11:16

Yeah, so there's a little hand tool called a core, and you can use this for apples, but I like using'em for tomatoes as well. Sometimes the tomatoes I get from the farm Really big. Tops on them where the stem has come out, and it's really great to use. You just twist a little bit and you can pull that core out pretty well. Even if you push it all the way through, you're not really losing a lot of tomatoes. Usually it's the seeds and the tomato juice on the inside. When I throw'em in the freezer, I just throw'em in hole. But if I'm throwing them in the blender for a salsa or something. That's when I use my core. But you can use that for all kinds of fruit or vegetable. But you've never used one of those, is that right, Jenny?

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 11:58

Yeah, I've never had one. I don't think I tried one for strawberries and I didn't find it to be so useful that I couldn't do without it. So that's the only core style I think I've ever used. I've used a melon baller to core pears, but that's not the same thing. So I just use a sharp knife. And actually that's a tool we should definitely have added maybe was for working with tomatoes, you need your sharpest knife because it will be annoying otherwise. will you tell us about the immersion blender that you use and that you love?

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 12:27

Oh sure. I think any immersion blender is fantastic It has like a stainless steel blade. I used one for years that had a plastic your product gets hot in the pot, I don't really like using plastic in a boiling

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 12:40

Right.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 12:41

just'cause I'm like, oh great. More plastic in my body. so I recommend getting one that's either a stainless steel or, or something that's not The immersion blender for something. Is it for tomato sauce?

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 12:53

So I do love an immersion blender for all things in the kitchen. Love, love it. I'm just sort of waiting till I can find one or the yard, I'm just living without it and I miss it. They're really, really great. for ketchup and or barbecue sauce? There's several good tested recipes for those tomato products out there, and I've had very good results in cooking them in a crockpot and then just coming in every hour or two hours or whatever, and just with the. Immersion blender and that makes a very thick and smooth sauce. It's excellent for making, apple butter. I do the apple butter exactly the same way in the crockpot, and it just makes for a very smooth product that's very comparable to store bought in terms of texture and consistency. it's a very good way to do it, and less hands on time for you just standing at the stove. So I do love that. And an immersion blender is really great for making a good, smooth, basic tomato sauce. I use a blender and I skip the peeling entirely so you can can in jars, bits of tomato skin, or I guess it would be the whole skin in my case. As long as you don't have an Italian grandmother who will, you know, disown you for doing so, I find that. I don't find any taste difference or textured, objection with blending my tomatoes. I just core them in like half or quarter them and toss them into a blender so I have a bigger volume, right? And just blend and then pour that into my cooking pot and then start cooking everything down. So that's what has worked for me and it's safe to do that. And I don't have an Italian grandmother to tell me not to do that. I think it's easier and I feel like it's probably just a little bit more fiber for my kids and me, and it's no problem in my mind. So I do my basic tomato sauces with a blender. So you could do that too. what other ways can we suggest people use? Anna, tell us about your food processor.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 14:49

Yeah, so last, I wanna say Black Friday I got a Ninja blender. Food processor combo. It was on sale and I had been trying to use a small food processor, a two cup food processor for salsa making, and it was just annoying. It was not the size I wanted, but this nine cup, I think it's nine cups, food processor is fantastic because not only does it come with discs that you can do. diced or shredded from the top. I use it when I'm doing onions, peppers, and hot peppers for my salsa. I will throw in, two quartered. and get like the perfect diced onion. Then I can throw those in the pot with my tomatoes for salsa. It's just so much easier and I love it because I don't have to chop everything by hand. much as I wanna be a sous chef, I don't enjoy that part of salsa making shortcuts I can do to make it quicker. wanna pass along to you so that you can also. Have a fun time canning and preserving and not be hot and sweaty in the kitchen and stressed out. some of the joy that Jenny and I have from processing food comes from finding shortcuts that work for you and your family. So the food processor was a great tool for me and I hope it will be for you as well. why don't you talk about the electric food mill?

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 16:18

Okay, so I had an electric food mill that was sent to me, this is quite a while ago by ball and it was really cool. Cool. As in cool. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was great. I don't love cleaning appliances like that. you are always gonna have to do some dishes, but at the time my kitchen was teeny tiny. I had no dishwasher and it was like an appliance it was great, but I just did not have room to keep. And I think I gave it to my sister because it just, I didn't have the room to store something. I didn't use that often. But they're out there. They're available. You could thrift one. And I would say that especially if you get a good deal on it, you should definitely try it. It looks like the analog food mills that our grandmothers would've clamped to a countertop or table, and it has a cone coming out of the side and then a, a slide for the sauce to come out of into a bowl on the countertop, which people use those to do apple sauce. I mean, the analog versions of those with the conical shape, lying sideways, or more horizontal rather than vertical, were very popular. And it's an electric version of that. I know my mom used the hand crank version for several things when I was growing up and it was just like a lot of cranking, just if you'd use it all the time, it gets tiresome, but also you may not mind that, I just love something that's never gonna break. You're not gonna find something that works better for the job it was intended. Those work really great. So after I got rid of the electric food mill, which I just didn't have room to store really, I used exclusively a food mill called the Oxo Food Mill. And it's a little bit different shape. It's a bowl. The disc is at the base of the bowl. It has little feet, like a space shuttle that come out and you set it on top of a bowl, so it's more of a vertical setup rather than a left to right or horizontal setup. And into the hopper, which is pretty big. You can just in your cooked tomatoes or I use it for applesauce. I use it a lot in other things. So to me, it was more versatile and a little bit easier to use, and definitely easier to clean. The electric food mill. So I love the Oxo brand food mill for processing tomatoes. And pretty much any cooked fruit or veg, that sucker works so fantastic and it's very easy to wash in the dishwasher or by hand. It all comes apart. There's no nooks and crannies. Other than the disc, but that's unavoidable. It's much easier to clean. I think I would go so far to say it is much easier to clean. Have you used one of those or do you not have one of the bowl shaped food mills? Anna.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 18:57

When the kids were really little, I had one to make, fruit purees for the kids, like when they were babies, and it was very small. So I know exactly what you're talking about, but I've never seen a big one or used a big one. But I know that you love yours.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 19:12

When you see women getting the teeny tiny. Everything to process food for babies. Don't you wish for them that they would just be gifted a full-size thing so they can use it for longer than six months? I feel like that's such a crime and I feel so sorry. Every time I'm like, they just don't like, especially if you're a new mom, you don't know what the heck you're gonna need or for how long you just, you're just signing up for everyone else is signing up for. But if you were gifting or shopping for yourself for early mom hood. I got mine at my baby shower because I have a very practical friend, also named Anna. She's my other Anna. She gave me that Oxo food mill and my, that was literally 14 years ago, and I use it often. It's so good and it's just more like family size, not baby size. You don't need to make, there's such a short amount of time that you need to make a tiny amount of puree, like you will use a full-size one forever. what else do we have on our list, Anna, for tools that we love? Anything else?

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 20:11

I had one, an electric food mill. This was something that is similar to the hand crank one that you were I found one. On Amazon, I spent almost a hundred bucks on Like, oh, this will be so great for tomatoes, right? Because it separates out the seeds, the skins, the whatever, and just gives you this lovely tomato sauce. I tried putting that thing together and it took a long time. had a million pieces and in the end it just got clogged and I was so disappointed. And it was past the point when I could return it. And so now it just stares at me in the garage every time I go out to the garage. So either I need to get rid of it, number one. Or face my fears and try it again and see if I can get it to work. But if you have one that you love, let us know.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 21:04

Yeah.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 21:05

it's usually a plugin type of situation with a little motor, and you just drop it in the hopper on the top, and then it goes through this auger and then comes out the front. But I don't know I have seen, some like heavy duty. Varieties, maybe homemade on YouTube or Instagram, people doing like big tomato processing parties. Maybe they're like have like Italian grandmothers standing there, this is how you do it. But I did, it wasn't everything I hoped it would be, which is always frustrating when you want something to work really badly and you spend money on it.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 21:41

I actually think that the most important part of it is, like you said, it gets clogged. that tells you it's gonna be a pain to clean, and that's what's so annoying about spending money on these things, and that's what makes it really. Not fun to use. The other type of tool that you could explore for processing tomatoes is a KitchenAid mixer attachment, and I know there's other brands of mixers that also sell attachments,

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 22:09

Oh yeah.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 22:09

You may have to explore those for whatever brand you may have. But I do have a KitchenAid mixer and if you start looking like I would go to the KitchenAid website and just look at all their accessories that they sell. They sell a lot of accessories and they clip onto the front or screw on, I guess to the very front. And we have used the meat grinder. I think I got that before we were married. I think I've had that meat grinder for 15 years, a long time, it is, Just very strong. Like the motor in your KitchenAid is a strong motor. And then the attachments it's nice because it's not as big as a whole new appliance and it makes use of that one invested purchase that you have, that one big KitchenAid. They have like a sifter and a scale like for making, I really wanna get it for my daughter for making macarons the little cookies, that you sift the almond flour.

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 23:00

Yeah.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 23:00

They have just more attachments than you might realize, and they have one that is specifically for pro, it's like a food processing attachment. And yeah, the hopper isn't really big, but it might be a really great option, especially if you live in a smaller space or a smaller apartment or something. I think that would be the hot ticket. That would be something to check out and I've seen a bazillion KitchenAid attachments listed on Poshmark or eBay, so that might also be a great place to look if you're shopping for something like that to help you process all your preserves, but tomatoes for sure. what else do we have on our Ian?

anna_1_06-08-2025_125854: 23:35

I was just gonna mention also like Jenny talked about her pressure canning cookbook. They are available in tractor supply stores, which is amazing. There's a lot of tractor supply stores out there, so it is available at Tractor Supply stores and Amazon. But also in any of your bookstores, you can ask for it there. So we love our good independent book sellers, of course. And then I also have eBooks and video courses on all things tomatoes. You can find that@smarthomecanning.com. It's really easy. It's$10 for a mini course and$40 for a whole course. So Jenny and I both offer options for. Tomatoes or other food preserving. And as always, we love pointing people toward extension office The internet is a great place to find the USDA website, the National Center for Home Food Preservation. We always want to give you the best up to date scientifically proven and tested recipes so that you are as safe as possible when you do your home canning. And, so you will also find that in Jenny's book or my courses as well.

jenny-gomes_1_06-08-2025_115854: 24:41

yes. Thank you for mentioning that, Anna. I think this is a great episode and I feel like for the most popular Preserve tomatoes, it's really great to have tools that make it easier to get to the fun part, and you're not spending all kinds of time just cleaning up tomato water all over your kitchen. Hopefully these tools were really helpful to you and we look forward to seeing you next time.

25:03

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