May Food In Jars: Cold (Raw) Pack Processing

The Food In Jars challenge this month was "cold pack processing" (also known as 'raw pack').  Basically it means you don't pre-cook your vegetable/fruit before processing.  You put the raw produce into the jar and put brine/sugar/juice...whatever your liquid is on top of the produce.

Then you process it in a hot water bath.

Most of the recipes I found were for pickles.  And frankly I'm pickled out.  

Then I found a recipe for canned whole tomatoes...

...and that is why I headed out to the Amish produce auction.  There are a lot of greenhouse grown tomatoes available this early.  See that box on the corner of the table?  Those are my "canning tomatoes".  I think it is a half bushel and my scale said it was about 25 pounds.

Aren't they pretty?  And they smelled so good.

After picking out a few to keep for eating, we got busy preparing them.  We cored and slice in X in to bottom of each one.  Then they were blanched for 2 minutes to make the skins slip off.  That left us with the tomatoes on the right.

From there we just put them into the ready-to-go jars, mashing them down a bit to get them nice and juicy.  A bit of clean-up and the jars went into the processor.

My pot holds 4 quart jars.  It was only when I got them into the pot that I checked the processing time...

EIGHTY-FIVE MINUTES!!

Are you kidding me?  I was shocked.  I wonder how many cans I could have bought for the electricity I used.  I had about a quart and a half of tomatoes left...and they went into the freezer for soup.

Supposedly it is fairly normal for crushed tomatoes to separate and you just give it a shake before you use it.  Yeah...

So these tomatoes are my one venture into canning tomatoes.