Want to preserve these wonderful tomatoes from your garden or the one you bought and loved so much? This is so easy you won’t believe it. I am using here the cherry tomatoes we grew in our garden. After the amount I eat when I come back from work I am still amazed at how many pots of preserves I managed to make, and the season is not over yet!

Home grown equals great flavours, and these cherry tomatoes are sweet and juicy. But as for fruits, the more you cook tomatoes the more you loose these great flavours. Even though tomatoes are fruits, they have far less sugar than “normal” fruits. This is a problem for preserving in itself as sugar is the main agent causing the death of the micro organisms that would otherwise grow on your jams (for the scientists, adding extra sugar or salt will create a high osmotic pressure with the low salt/sugar concentration inside the bacteria cell, and it will basically suck out all the water from the bacteria cell and dry it to death- charming and efficient). If you want to preserve your tomatoes for a long time (more than 6 months), you should dehydrate them by heating them up in a pan and reduce the juices as much as possible. THEN fill your clean jars and sterilise them, so you are technically cooking them twice and this will cause a dramatic loss in flavour.

My technique here means that you won’t be able to keep your cans for very long, but like me if you are not making tomato preserve on an industrial scale, it should help you to conserve the flavour of sumer for a few months for you spare tomatoes. And it is so easy you won’t believe it.
My grandma uses this technique for their home grown beef tomatoes, which are more fleshy and release less juices than the cherry tomatoes. Beef tomatoes also have a thicker skin so she tends to flash boil and peel them before doing the preserves. This technique is fabulous because, although you won’t be able to keep these pots for ages, they will still last throughout the cold months until you can find seasonal tomatoes again.