Kitchen Tip: Stewed Tomatoes

This one isn't so much a recipe as a kitchen tip; a way to process and store tomatoes when they come into season. I know this post is way too early for all of you farther north, but I'm going to post a couple recipes that use these tomatoes this week. What you get here is a homemade version of canned, stewed tomatoes. If you haven't had the chance to preserve your own fresh tomatoes, just use canned in my recipes.

There are many ways to can or preserve fresh tomatoes at home. This technique is a really easy way to not only take advantage of fresh tomatoes when you get them, but also have that slow-cooked tomato flavor at your disposal whenever you need it and in no time at all. My friend Joe always makes gallons of tomato sauce at the end of the summer, which is great, but requires a fair amount of work and leaves your house smelling very tomatoey for a week. What I describe here does not give you sauce, it gives you stewed tomatoes, which can then be made into a nice, thick marinara sauce, homemade ketchup, added to stews or soups, or anything else you can think of where cooked tomatoes are needed.

In the interest of keeping things simple, I don’t peel or seed the tomatoes before cooking them. You could do that if you wanted, but it would defeat the purpose of keeping things no fuss. These quantities are for an 8 cup crock pot.

Stewed Tomatoes

4 lbs ripe tomatoes washed and roughly chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 one gallon zip-loc bags

Put the tomatoes and salt in the crock pot. Cook on high for 4-6 hours or on low for 8-10 hours. Once the time is up, blend the cooked tomatoes with a stick blender or upright blender. Let the tomatoes cool for about half an hour. You should have about 6 or 7 cups of stewed tomatoes. Ladle 3-4 cups into each zip-loc bag. The easiest way to do this is to place the bag in an upright container, like a yogurt container, ladle the tomatoes in, then squeeze the air out and close the bag while the container supports the liquid.

Clear a flat space in your freezer and lay the bags out flat. They will be frozen solid in a few hours. One bag is a good quantity for sauce for a pound of pasta. If you need to use less than a bag, just gently break off what you need. While the tomatoes will come out of the crock pot very watery, they will thicken up quickly on the stove. If you have a bigger crock pot, you can obviously stew more tomatoes at a time. Just fill the thing to the brim with chopped tomatoes!