Late summer of 2012, I purchased a Victorio Food Strainer for the purpose of making blueberry juice for my ill husband. I found a video online about it where a woman was showing how she used her Victorio to make tomato juice, soup, and sauce. (Link below.)

She ran the tomatoes through her strainer, then strained the juice out of the sauce and canned both juice and sauce. I had started making tomato juice for the first time just the year before and would strain the juice through cheesecloth. And then I would throw away all the solids! I was just sick when I saw this video and realized all the goodness I had been throwing out!

Since then, I have been trying to figure out what other obvious things like this I had been missing all these years. For instance, I see references to seedless or nearly seedless tomatoes, and these are recommended for making sauce.

Last summer, I grew my first ever paste tomatoes, San Marzano. I got alot of them, they were beautiful, but I thought they tasted awful! They were dry and mealy and had very little flavor....what am I missing here?

I guess my question is this. Would some of you describe the following?

What you look for in choosing tomato varieties to grow.

The specific things you can: juice, sauce, salsa, etc. I realize now, that there are probably things I could be doing with tomatoes that I haven't, because I never thought of them.

Think about how you use tomatoes and that should help you figure out what to grow. We love them fresh and in the products mentioned.

Another tip if you haven't already stumbled over it here is to freeze your tomatoes whole (just rinse and remove stems) before making sauce. You can slip the skins off by just running under hot water, thaw in a strainer over a bowl (tomato juice!!), then push through the strainer. No pot of boiling water to remove skins, no cooking before saucing. If you want the sauce thicker, cook it down in a large roasting pan in the oven. You can do other things and it won't scorch. Stir every half hour or so. I often make the sauce and cook it down one day, refrigerate, then heat to boiling and can it the next day.

I think mixing varieties is the best of both worlds, paste types for the density and heirlooms for flavor!

Love my Victorio strainer (also use for applesauce, berry and grape "pulp" for jam/jelly, etc).

Deanna

Tomato juice and sauce - I never strain my tomato juice. I pre-cook the fruit just enough to soften, run them through my Victorio and can all the resulting juice. It makes for a much thicker, richer tomato juice. Sure it separates in the jar over time but that is easy to fix with just a light shake.

When we make tomato sauce we do the same things except we first return all the juice to the pot and cook it down to sauce consistency. When we want flavored sauce we first cook all the tomatoes with onions, peppers, carrots, herbs, celery, etc. and then run it all through the Victorio and cook it down to sauce consistency for canning.

We also can 70-80 jars of just plain Crushed Tomatoes. That way they can be used for making all sorts of things during the winter - spaghetti sauce, chili, soup, casseroles, etc.

We also can dozens of jars of the BBB recipe for Stewed Tomatoes (contain onions, peppers, celery) for winter use.

We pick varieties for flavor and production numbers. Color is only a secondary consideration. Seed numbers I ignore as the Victoric takes care of the seeds.

Small fruit varieties and colored types can be used to make all of the above just like beefsteaks or oxhearts. We plant very few paste types as they are never noted for flavor, just bulk. Why sacrifice flavor just for bulk?

The only paste-types we grow now are Viva Italia and San Marzano and they are primarily for drying. Your experience with San Marzano is unusual IME. Mealyness is an inconsistent soil moisture level issue, not a variety issue. But we never make our sauce/juice/canned tomatoes using paste-types only.

Opalka is another excellent paste-type but its production numbers are low by comparison.

Hope this helps.

Dave

BBB????

That being said, I always use a mix of tomatoes in any sauce I make. Red, purple, pink, orange - whatever is ripe at the time. This gives you a very rich flavored sauce.

Cindy