Can the Tomatoes—You’ll Never Go Back
Posted in Exhibitions, The Edible Garden on July 23rd, 2010 by Plant Talk – 1 CommentDemonstration Shows How to Put Up Your Own at Home
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Eugenia Bone is a veteran food writer and author of Well-Preserved. She will present canning demonstrations at The Edible Garden Conservatory Kitchen on July 25 at 1 and 3 p.m. |
You may remember your grandmother putting up fruits in glass jars. Well, that practice is alive and well in New York City today, and it’s as safe and easy as it ever was.
The motivation for urban and suburban canning is to have foods on hand to eat off-season (as well as for health, economic, and environmental reasons). All you have to do is decide what you’d really like to have stocked in the cupboard. People often ask me what is a good starter product for the beginner canner. I always say, whatever you like to eat! For me, that’s tomatoes. But to make it manageable, I put up a couple of pints at a time, when I am cooking dinner and hanging around the kitchen anyway.
Though tomatoes are a fruit, they have a pH usually of 4.5 or 4.6, which is just on the borderline of foods you can safely process in a water bath. For this reason, the Feds recommend you acidify all tomato products. You can use 2 tablespoons of lemon juice per pint, but I prefer a 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid. I buy 4-ounce jars of NOW citric acid online (www.nowfoods.com, keyword “citric acid”), and that does the trick of acidifying tomatoes beautifully.
I can tomatoes two ways, depending on how much time I have. read more »