1st year garden is really giving us some good tomatoes. Not going to be able to eat them all so I would really like to make some marinara sauce and stewed tomatoes that are canned and will have a nice shelf life.

What have you got for me??

I love what this old guy makes.
I have made a bunch of his recipes with great success.

What kind of shelf life does that stuff have?

OK, here's what my wife and I do. I don't give it a fancy name nor even have a strict recipe, but it turns out consistently good year after year. I usually plant 16 tomato plants or so, two of the cherry/grape varieties, and the rest full size (think varieties like Big Boy, Celebrity, Rutgers, etc.) This works out to getting 20 to 30 lbs. a week of fresh fruit from mid-July through mid-Sept. That's a lot of tomatoes! More than we can consume in BLT's, salads, etc. etc. etc. When we have cukes, I make a few rounds of Gazpacho, but most of the red ripe thingies go into a tomato sauce base that we freeze and use throughout the year. The following describes the procedure we follow in making the sauce.

Before starting on the tomatoes, pour yourself a cold one, you are facing a long process consuming most of the afternoon. Start by cutting up and sautéing four to ten peppers, (Bells, Poblanos, Serranos, Jalapenos, etc.), one medium onion, and four or so cloves of garlic. Some of the peppers should be green, but using ripe ones is OK too. We put a handful of oregano, and a sprig or two of basil (we grow this too) stems removed and leaves chopped. This all should be nicely cooked down by the time the first batch of tomato pulp is ready to add to the pot. It is OK to dispense with the peppers and onion, and make just a straight tomato sauce base. Make sure you use a big enough pot, we use an 8-qt. stock pot. Also half-fill a 2 qt. pot with water and put it on to boil. Move the trash can near the processing area, there will be a lot of wet stuff to dispose of.

Gather about 50-60 lbs of ripe tomatoes, this will give you four or five processing batches. Cut about 12 at a time into quarters, removing the stems and any bad spots. Drop the quarters into a pot of boiling water for 60 seconds to loosen the skins. Fish them out with a slotted spoon, and drop into a colander to drain, do not dump the hot water, you will need it for the next batch. When drained and cooled a little, the skins will come away from the flesh easily. put the water pot back on the flame to re-heat for the next batch. Put the skinned tomatoes through a tomato mill, catching the juices in a pan. The way the mill works is that it separates the juice and pulp from the seeds and other rough parts. The mill will strip the skins if you haven't done so manually, but we have found this makes more of a mess and impedes progress because there is a lot more clean-up to do in the interim. When we have two people working this, one of us is cutting up the next batch of tomatoes while the other one is cranking the mill. When the catch pan is near full, pour the juice+pulp into the stock pot. Once you have gone through your pile of tomatoes, and gotten all the juice you will get, let the sauce base simmer, stirring occasionally, until reduced by at least half or until it is as thick as you want. We like to get it pretty thick before freezing if only to save space. This is a lengthy process, it is unusual to finish cooking it down the same day you start. Enjoy the sweet smell of cooking tomatoes permeating your house, pour yourself another beverage to celebrate the hard work being done.

We freeze it in those plastic containers/cups that salsa and grated Parmesan cheese come in. These hold about a pint or pint and a half, a convenient size for cooking a tomato sauce. Once frozen, the sauce base ice blocks can be popped out due to the tapered sides of the containers. We move the blocks into gallon-size freezer bags for longer term storage, and so we can re-use the cups the next go 'round. I suppose one could also can the sauce base, but we have always frozen it.

quote:

Originally posted by Sportshooter:
What kind of shelf life does that stuff have?

As long as any water bath stuff has. My mom and grandma used to do it that way as well. I like to water bath with a little lemon juice just to be safe(er).

Here's another one I saw a few years ago. Similar methods.

I don’t recall ever reading anything about the equivalent of the water bath canning method. I guess the extra cooking time does what the water bath or pressure canning methods do to botulism.
After cooking the sauce down for 3 hours, how necessary is it be to cover the jars with all those towels?

We canned sauce for a few years but decided the yield wasn't worth the time invested. I had an electric tomato mill because cranking a manual mill wasn't much fun after a while. We like our sauce on the thicker side so by the time it was cooked down 20# of tomatos didn't make much sauce and while it was amazing fresh, it wasn't as good after a year in the canning jar. It was still good but not as good as fresh. I planted Roma's and San Marzano's for sauce exclusively. It's fun but it's a fair bit of time so clear a good half day. If you like Salsa I've used Mrs Wages mix from Walmart and it's really good.