Funny-lookin’ homegrown produce
Katie Thomas of Roanoke grew these "penguin" Romas
I grew this alien Mr. Stripey
And finally, some normal maters from my garden.
I received an email from reader Katie Thomas the other day, along with her funny pictures of “March of the Penguins” Roma tomatoes from her garden. I had my own bizarro tomato this year – see this funny Mr. Stripey with a bunch of tiny lumps on the bottom? Weird!
But my garden has produced plenty of normal maters, mainly Mr. Stripeys and Golden Boys, which we’ve been enjoying at dinner. For lunch, I eat them with cottage cheese. Today, I’m planning on having a BLT.
What are your tomatoes doing so far this year? If you have a funny produce picture you’d like to share, I would LOVE to see it! Email it to me and I’ll post it on this blog.
July 25, 2011 - 9:55 AM
RSS feed 
We had our first adventure in food preservation yesterday canning 9 jars of pickled okra, green beans, and cucumbers from the garden. I had gone down to the market Saturday to talk to the food preservation people, and we bought a couple of recipe books and a big canning pot at the True Value on Brambleton.
The jars look so cute with the garlic and peppercorns floating around in them. Hopefully they’ll taste as good as they look!
I was going to ask if anyone here had any food prez experience and had bought the pressure cooker canner for “low acid” stuff, and if that’s actually necessary. I’m going to have a zillion tomatoes to can and the woman downtown told me that they were considered “low acid”?
I cannot live without a pressure cooker. Wouldn’t know how to cook a potato without one. Been using them all my life. Make canning VERY simple. Snag a copy of the Ball Blue Book of canning. It’s invaluable. I used to can salsa every year, but I haven’t planted a garden for a while, so the canner just sits waiting. It doesn’t eat anything and I figure I’ll use it again one of these days. Maybe I’ll buy a bushel of tomatoes later this season and do another batch. Nothing like fresh salsa!
P.S. I only have grape tomatoes, but they are coming on strong. When I go up to feed the goats every night, I can grab a handful, but they never make it to the house.
I would have guessed off the top of my head that tomatoes have enough acid to be canned in a hot water bath versus pressure canning. But the canning book on my desk (“Tart and Sweet,” Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler) says they fall very close to the cutoff line between acid and alkaline. The line is 4.6 pH, and tomatoes are around 4 pH.
The book says “In canning, tomatoes are treated more like a fruit than a vegetable… in that they should contain enough acid to preserve safely in a water bath. Operative word: should. As tomatoes ripen, acidity can drop to potentially unsafe levels, which is why the USDA recommends acidifying canned tomatoes by adding citric acid (vitamin C) or bottled lemon juice to ensure safe canning.”
They recommend this formula:
1 pint (2 cups) tomatoes – add 1 Tbsp. bottled lemon juice or 1/4 tsp. citric acid.
1 quart (4 cups) tomatoes: add 2 Tbsp. bottled lemon juice or 1/2 tsp. citric acid.
I’d still be very interested to see what others with more experience have to say.
Hi Lindsey! My tomatoes are doing pretty well, having to water them a lot of course. I have better boys and super sonics and they are loaded! Still haven’t picked a ripe one but boy are they close! Over the next week or so we’re going to have way more than we can eat… so won’t be buying them down at the Salem Farmer’s Market like we have been. It’s looking like this first run may be the best of the summer. Don’t have many smaller tomatoes, and the new blooms are mostly drying up and falling off due to the heat. Thank goodness for the Farmer’s Market!
Hey Dennis! One of my neighbors gave me a bunch of his tomatoes (thanks, Randy!) and I had some from Howard’s mom, so I had to scald them and peel them and put them in the freezer yesterday. It was fast, though, and they’ll be so good in soup or something this fall. I hope yours get ripe soon, but not all at once
I always canned tomatoes and other fruit in a hot water bath, not pressure cooking. I used the pressure cooker for green beans and other ‘non-acid’ vegetables. If you canned green beans in a hot water bath it would take forever! I’m not into heating my kitchen this time of the year! Freezing is much easier and quicker, and you still get that fresh taste of summer veggies.
Fun post! I’ve photographed some of my garden but have yet to see anything funny looking aside from an evil horn worm that threatened to kill an entire tomato plant. I’m growing Rutgers, German Johnson, cherry, and a pear-shaped variety this year.
If you plan to can tomato sauce or juice, I find that a tomato press is an invaluable tool. I bought a good one from Williams-Sonoma (search ‘italian tomato press) for a mere $40. It separates the skin and seeds from the pulp. I often run the tomatoes through it twice to really eek out all the goodness.
Thanks Lindsey…I have some citric acid from my cheese making experiments…I’ll give it a shot.
You can get around pressure canning green beans by making “dilly beans” in a hot water bath. They are wonderful!
Dilly beans ARE wonderful. My mom’s recipe is in the PlateUp database: http://www.roanoke.com/food/recipes/details/?rid=179&sorig=qs
Kristen,
Different types of tomatoes have different levels of acid. As a general rule, yellow tomatoes and cherry types are lower in acid than the red types. Perhaps that is what the lady was referring to. We don’t can the yellow ones, but Lindsey had a recipe for canned green cherry tomatoes a while back that I want to try this year.