Best Ways to Preserve tomatoes

Passata is Italian for sieved tomatoes – which is nothing but tomato puree with the skin and seeds removed. You can use Passata in stews, soups, and gravies to give it that sweet tomato flavor without the hint of bitterness from the seeds. However, Passata does take a while to make, so it’s best to make a large batch. Here is how:

· Peel and chop the tomatoes and remove stalks.

· Put the tomatoes in a large-size pan and cook them on medium heat. Keep cooking until they are soft. Then, use a potato masher to mash the tomatoes and loosen the seeds.

· Grab a sieve and pass the batch through it to filter out the seeds.

· The remaining puree can be stored in a jar and frozen up for future use.

This is the easiest way to preserve tomatoes until you’re ready to use them in one of your delicious recipes. The best part? You don’t need to peel the tomatoes before freezing. If anything, freezing them will make it delightfully easy to peel those tomatoes.

Juicier tomatoes are the most suitable for freeze storing. However, it’s best to use them in recipes that require cooking the tomatoes because they probably won’t look very nice in a salad after they are defrosted.

Oven-dried tomatoes are generally not dry enough to last very long, but placing them in a jar and covering them with olive oil will certainly help them live longer when stored in the fridge. When you need them for your stews, salads, pasta, or roasts – just remove them from the fridge and start chopping.

Oven-drying the tomatoes is a straightforward process that requires just the tomatoes and sea salt. Slice all your tomatoes from the middle and remove the parts that are attached to the tomato’s stem. Sprinkle sea salt over the tomatoes, put them in the oven, and heat at 160F for 2-3 hours depending on the juiciness of the tomatoes.