Salt is a Dangerous Ingredient
Aug. 26th, 2010 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluesgardenRight, so obviously I hit that What was I thinking?! portion of the harvest season last night (or, er, this morning, actually). It probably didn't help that the day before had been a full day in and of itself for entirely different reasons - yearly vet check-up for the pups in the morning, followed a few hours later by a trip to Toledo with D which included a movie (INCEPTION!), which meant we didn't make it home until 10pm.
The rest of the story starts with the fact that I was dealing with 73 pounds (33.1 kg) of tomatoes. At this point I get a bit flaily and whimpering, but I shall try to articulate the factors that led to v. small nervous breakdown.
In order to make spaghetti sauce similar in thickness to what one would buy in the jar from the store, you need tomato pulp. Not tomato seeds, skins, or excess liquid. The seeds and skins are easy enough for me to remove with the Victorio, but tomatoes have a lot of liquid in them. Once I'd turned the tomatoes into juice (chop, heat on stove, run through juicer), I had a fine mesh strainer that I was using to separate the solids from the liquids. It works but it's small and 73 pounds of tomatoes renders a good bit of juice. You can't simply reduce it down, not realistically, since we're talking gallons of liquid. So all this was tedious and time consuming but going along relatively swimmingly... right up until I added too much salt to the nearly finished sauce. Instead of a quarter cup, I grabbed the half cup measure and, oh wow, could you ever tell.
That was frustrating, to say the least, but I pulled the remaining jars of tomatoes that I'd canned last year from the cupboard along with some cans of juice and set about separating the solids to add into the pot. I wouldn't want to make an entire batch of the stuff that way, but it would suffice to thin out the frakkin' salt.
More tedious and time consuming effort later, it was pretty clear the a) the old juice had some seasoning of its own, limiting its usefulness in this scenario, and b) the juice of the older tomatoes didn't separate as easily as the newer stuff had. Which was about the point I just hit the limits of my patience. ARRGHH.
After posting, I ended up putting a pot of the juice (from the older tomatoes) on to reduce a bit, thinking it couldn't hurt at this point, and grumpily poured myself a conciliatory bowl of D's sugary cereal to eat while scanning my friends lists and reading some Arthur/Eames fic. Despite everything that had happened up to that point, there was something oddly soothing about the smell of boiling tomato juice and when combined with the sugar, carbs, and feel good fic - well, I decided I might make it through the experience after all. I still ached from head to toe, but my frame of mind was considerably better.
While the juice continued to boil, I started in on the tagging preliminaries to the coding I had to do, but there was something nagging at my brain about heat and tomato juice separation. Rescuing the strainer from the soapy water the juicer was soaking in, I cleaned it off, broke out a fresh ladle, and tested it. Holy mother of Pete, it separated much, much better. So then I started alternating between tagging and stirring the contents of the strainer around so the liquids could drain off. Once all the extra pulp was added the sauce, I tasted it again. At this point, there may have been a ray of light and the sound of heavenly choirs, or I may have just been delusional by then, take it as you will, but it tasted like spaghetti sauce. I'm pretty sure. It didn't taste like someone had dumped too much salt in it at least.
IT WAS GETTING CANNED ASAP. So I started two water baths boiling on the propane burner(s) outside, turned the heat on under the sauce, and worked on coding while periodically jumping up and stirring. By the time I'd finished coding (it went relatively quickly and it takes at least half and hour to heat that much water up to boiling), it was time to put the sauce into jars. I absolutely cheated here. Those jars the whole tomatoes had been in from last year? The ones I'd rinsed out? They're now holding sauce. Essentially the same product, 99% clean, and good enough.
Jars of sauce went in the water baths, timer was set for 40 minutes, coding was sent off, and I started in on a partial clean up. By just after 3am, the jars were cooling on the table, the computer was shut down, the remaining dishes almost all fit in the sink, and I could stagger off to bed.
Here's the part where you appreciate just how much liquid is in tomatoes though: from 73 pounds of tomatoes, 10 quart jars of canned whole tomatoes, and 5 quart jars of tomato juice the resulting product was... 9 quart jars of spaghetti sauce. Which isn't even one a month for the next year, although I do have some other thin sauce that's mostly for baking pasta, so I'm calling it good. Just... *flail*
Tomato adventures still to happen: ketchup, salsa, whole canned tomatoes (now that I've used them all), tomato soup, and roasting some (possibly for the ketchup and soup). Not that I've ever canned ketchup, salsa, or tomato soup, mind you.
I never claimed sanity.
The rest of the story starts with the fact that I was dealing with 73 pounds (33.1 kg) of tomatoes. At this point I get a bit flaily and whimpering, but I shall try to articulate the factors that led to v. small nervous breakdown.
In order to make spaghetti sauce similar in thickness to what one would buy in the jar from the store, you need tomato pulp. Not tomato seeds, skins, or excess liquid. The seeds and skins are easy enough for me to remove with the Victorio, but tomatoes have a lot of liquid in them. Once I'd turned the tomatoes into juice (chop, heat on stove, run through juicer), I had a fine mesh strainer that I was using to separate the solids from the liquids. It works but it's small and 73 pounds of tomatoes renders a good bit of juice. You can't simply reduce it down, not realistically, since we're talking gallons of liquid. So all this was tedious and time consuming but going along relatively swimmingly... right up until I added too much salt to the nearly finished sauce. Instead of a quarter cup, I grabbed the half cup measure and, oh wow, could you ever tell.
That was frustrating, to say the least, but I pulled the remaining jars of tomatoes that I'd canned last year from the cupboard along with some cans of juice and set about separating the solids to add into the pot. I wouldn't want to make an entire batch of the stuff that way, but it would suffice to thin out the frakkin' salt.
More tedious and time consuming effort later, it was pretty clear the a) the old juice had some seasoning of its own, limiting its usefulness in this scenario, and b) the juice of the older tomatoes didn't separate as easily as the newer stuff had. Which was about the point I just hit the limits of my patience. ARRGHH.
After posting, I ended up putting a pot of the juice (from the older tomatoes) on to reduce a bit, thinking it couldn't hurt at this point, and grumpily poured myself a conciliatory bowl of D's sugary cereal to eat while scanning my friends lists and reading some Arthur/Eames fic. Despite everything that had happened up to that point, there was something oddly soothing about the smell of boiling tomato juice and when combined with the sugar, carbs, and feel good fic - well, I decided I might make it through the experience after all. I still ached from head to toe, but my frame of mind was considerably better.
While the juice continued to boil, I started in on the tagging preliminaries to the coding I had to do, but there was something nagging at my brain about heat and tomato juice separation. Rescuing the strainer from the soapy water the juicer was soaking in, I cleaned it off, broke out a fresh ladle, and tested it. Holy mother of Pete, it separated much, much better. So then I started alternating between tagging and stirring the contents of the strainer around so the liquids could drain off. Once all the extra pulp was added the sauce, I tasted it again. At this point, there may have been a ray of light and the sound of heavenly choirs, or I may have just been delusional by then, take it as you will, but it tasted like spaghetti sauce. I'm pretty sure. It didn't taste like someone had dumped too much salt in it at least.
IT WAS GETTING CANNED ASAP. So I started two water baths boiling on the propane burner(s) outside, turned the heat on under the sauce, and worked on coding while periodically jumping up and stirring. By the time I'd finished coding (it went relatively quickly and it takes at least half and hour to heat that much water up to boiling), it was time to put the sauce into jars. I absolutely cheated here. Those jars the whole tomatoes had been in from last year? The ones I'd rinsed out? They're now holding sauce. Essentially the same product, 99% clean, and good enough.
Jars of sauce went in the water baths, timer was set for 40 minutes, coding was sent off, and I started in on a partial clean up. By just after 3am, the jars were cooling on the table, the computer was shut down, the remaining dishes almost all fit in the sink, and I could stagger off to bed.
Here's the part where you appreciate just how much liquid is in tomatoes though: from 73 pounds of tomatoes, 10 quart jars of canned whole tomatoes, and 5 quart jars of tomato juice the resulting product was... 9 quart jars of spaghetti sauce. Which isn't even one a month for the next year, although I do have some other thin sauce that's mostly for baking pasta, so I'm calling it good. Just... *flail*
Tomato adventures still to happen: ketchup, salsa, whole canned tomatoes (now that I've used them all), tomato soup, and roasting some (possibly for the ketchup and soup). Not that I've ever canned ketchup, salsa, or tomato soup, mind you.
I never claimed sanity.
