For mikeinpa, I would like to hear how you can cole slaw.

Nice looking elderberries Keith. Amazing to me they are so early.

Trying to figure out how to avoid watery tomato sauce........been watching a lot of utubes.......how the real Italians do it. If you believe what our experts say about canning, there should not be a single Italian left alive. They routinely break every rule there is and live to tell about it. They also make some excellent looking sauce and don't do it the way the canning books tell you. Boil it down by half? Add lemon juice? You have got to be kidding.

Thanks Carl. I harvested the first heads the last week in June and froze them. I'll have some berries in later September and maybe into October again too, because I have new flowers now. If it stays wet, I'll have more flowers still.





I should have stayed on the harvest better. Most of the berries have fallen off of the ripe heads or been stripped by birds. Birds are worse this year. I'll still get much more than we need or will give away. I have many more heads to ripen still.

When are elderberries ripe by you?

Keith

I have no clue what they are doing in Italy, but high acid food like tomato's, botulism is not really a concern. Especially making salsa with a little cider vinegar. Adding lemon juice raises acidity also.

This is but one of what could be dozens of "how we do it" videos. These Italians don't do it as our canning books say to do it. But getting raw tomatoes to a good sauce ready to jar......then have it nailed.

They use paste / sauce type tomatoes, may cut them up......may not. They boil them a bit to get the water to release, then strain, strain, and strain some more to get the water out. Tomatoes then run thru sieve to separate skins and seeds and that is it. None of that cooking down for hours to reduce by half stuff. They get it out by straining after cooking.

The scary part (at least according to what our food safety experts tell us) is they then put fresh basil in just about any old kind of jar (potential source of bacteria contamination), add no extra acid in form of lemon juice, vinegar, etc, fill..........then put on the lids. Some then use water bath to pasteurize, some will just put hot sauce in jar, seal them up and turn them upside down. Cover with blanket to let them cool slow. If it seals, it's good. If it blows up.....it went bad. Been doing it that way for generations.

Water bathing tomatoes has never caused issues in my house or moms or grandmas or great grandmas. They are naturally acidic

Although Tomatoes are naturally acidic,,adding Citric Acid or Lemon Juice is HIGHLY recommended in the modern canning manuals.

My plants are not doing as well as last year and are several weeks away from having ripe fruits for my salsa, sauces and juice.

Bryce

I have always water bath canned just like my folks did. I add 1 teaspoon salt and sugar per quart and never had any go bad.

I don't add salt, but I do put 2 table spoons of lemon juice per quart and 1 per pint of tomato product.

Bryce

We now cut our tomatoes, place them on baking sheets, and roast them in the oven for 45 minutes at 425 degrees. The tomatoes are then ground to a paste with an immersion blender (skin and all) before freezing. Fast and simple.

Just did a batch of HOT salsa. Should last me a few weeks!

Got a chance to try the sauce making method the Italian ladies were using. It worked! Got 4 pints of very thick sauce from what would have been about half a 5 gallon bucket of tomatoes. Roma, San Marzano and some no name plum type. Dropped whole, uncut maters straight into boiling water........returned to boil......then about 10 minutes more, then into a colander to drain. Ran them thru the mill and that was it. None of that cooking them down stuff at all. High yield of thick sauce and easy as it gets.

There may be some science to this as well. Experts say as soon as you cut a tomato, enzymes in it start to break it down.....separating water from the solids. Cooking to 180F stops all that......so dropping them whole into the boiling water prevents it from breaking down in the first place. The meat part holds together better.

There is another thing that one can conclude from watching how the Italians do it. If they are putting up sauce in volume......dozens and dozens of quarts in one day......... they use a high end "machine". These are not the el cheapo food mills they sell over here. The mostly plastic ones. They use big electric heavy steel contraptions from Fabio Leonardi or OMRA. It is a process you do not want to go thru for only a few pints like what I did.

So if one wanted to duplicate that process when growing our own.......may be best to also gear up to do a lot in one day. Plant several dozen determinate sauce type tomato plants so they all come ripe at the same time.......then pick a day and hit it. Plants are one and done......like sweet corn. Save the season long stuff for fried green tomatoes and slicing up on a plate.

I picked banana peppers and Catawba grapes today. I picked all but the smallest banana peppers. There are lots more ripe grapes to pick and the grapes have not started coloring up on the far side of my front yard arbor.

I put 265 grape vines on my hillside a few years ago, right before I had the adverse reaction. I got crippled up the next year. I never got my arbor up and it's a weedy mess. I think it's likely I have a bunch of grape vines on my hillside, that may be bearing.




Keith

How do you handle the banana peppers? My wife loves them.

I have used a steamer canner for about thirty years now, much better than a hot water bath

I use Jeff's (Catch22) recipe. I like the banana peppers that way better than store banana peppers.



https://trapperman.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/7687118/Searchpage/1/Main/551937/Words/%2BPeppers/Search/true/re-pickling-peppers-ers#Post7687118

I got just a tiny bit more than 3 quarts out of the pickles I picked yesterday.

Keith

The steam canners use much less water and get to temperature, much more quickly. They are also not as heavy to move around, which makes them easier for women to move. We have 2 steam canners that Diane asked for, for Christmas, from my parents one year.

Keith