One of the joys of gardening is coming across fresh-frozen produce, in the dead of winter, that you squirreled away last summer.
In the Spring of 2022, after determining that freezing was the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes (as long as you have room in an already-running freezer), I froze a bag of early-season “4th of July” tomatoes. Washed them, cut their tops off, put them in a vacuum-sealed bag, and froze them. (Then sealed the bag, after they had frozen.)
Source: Post G22-010.
The clincher for me was finding out that frozen tomatoes will slip right out of their skins. If you’ve every tried to peel a lot of tomatoes, you know what a plus that is.
That’s what I’m doing, in the video above, with the thawed tomatoes. They already have their tops cut off, they’ve been thawed, and they do, indeed, slip right out of their skins.
I learned that trick from the blog “from the family with love“. (You can see her video of peeling frozen tomatoes at this youtube URL). But, you know, sometimes, there is room for doubt until you actually do it with your own hands.
As a bonus, freezing them (after removing the tops) separates out most of the liquid. When I pulled the now-thawed tomatoes out of their vacuum-seal bag, roughly half of the output was tomato solids, half was tomato water.
Obviously, after freezing the texture isn’t good enough for eating out-of-hand. But for a quick batch of tomato sauce, or for adding some chopped tomatoes to a stew, these are fine. I’m making sauce, so I ran a stick blender through it to pulverize the seeds before reducing it down.
I might even go so far as to say that these are nice. Compared to canned tomatoes, freezing seems to preserve more of that “fresh tomato” taste. I’m vaguely guessing it preserves more of the aromatics that are lost in canning.
So there you have it. Wash them, cut the tops off, freeze, then seal the bag their are in. Thawed half a year later, they are a little taste of summer to enjoy in the dark of winter.
