Billy wrote in
:

I didn't have many excess tomatoes this year, so I froze them. I've
just used a bag of them and I find that they more or less melt into
whatever I put them into, i.e. they don't cook down into a sauce but
dissolve into a sauce. I presume the cellular structure is destroyed
by freezing.

Does anyone know of the vagaries of other preserving methods?

You *might* do ok if you froze them fast, like with dry ice. Tomatoes
are, depending on variety, around 50%-ish water. (This is a quick
estimate.) If you freeze something slow, you'll get large sharp ice
crystals that perforate cell walls and make them in to mush. If you
freeze it fast, you'll get smaller crystals and they won't do as much
damage. (Most this information from Good Eats' Strawberry show.)

My mother cooks them down on the stove, then puts the tomatoes in jars
and cans them in a hot water bath. Add some browned grown beef, garlic,
basil, and orgegano to a qt jar of sauce and you've got spaghetti sauce.
It's good stuff. :-)

Puckdropper
--
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