In article ,
General Schvantzkopf wrote:

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.

It looks to me that freezing them first helps to produce the sauce
because once defrosted, it's just a matter of reducing the liquid. No
blender is needed to remove the chunks. Freezing whole tomatoes does
take more space. So the reasonable thing, so it seem to me, would be to
freeze the tomatoes and the defrost and make your sauce and then
re-freeze the sauce.

Maybe I'll be lucky and just eat my tomatoes fresh.
--
Bush Behind Bars

Billy

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.
- Bob Marley