On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:53:23 -0800, Billy wrote:

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?

I cook them into a sauce base, i.e. just tomatoes, garlic and herbs, and
then freeze them in plastic containers, in a good year I make about 5
gallons of sauce, this year it was less. Then over the course of the year
I unfreeze some of the sauce, add meat, shrimp, mushrooms, more garlic,
and more herbs to turn it into a proper spaghetti sauce which I then
refreeze. Adding the other ingredients doubles the volume which is why I
do that piecemeal rather than all at once. Frozen sauce keeps forever.