Garden for long enough and you’ll eventually find yourself surrounded by so much fresh produce that you couldn’t possibly eat it all quickly enough. As far as problems go, it’s a good one to have.
When things go right, tomatoes are one of those crops that are often blessed in abundance. Once ripe, you’ve got maybe days before tomatoes start to turn. After the tomato is off the vine, the clock is ticking.
Living in the land of plenty is fantastic until you can’t bear the thought of your 20th BLT or tomato salad in a row. So when you embrace wholeheartedly the gardening lifestyle, it necessitates learning the practical skill of preservation. Canning is easy to do and will extend the shelf life of your homegrown tomatoes for at least a year.
Before you can get canning tomatoes, either whole or prepped into a recipe, you’ll need to remove the skins. It’s an essential step for the smoothest sauces, free of stringy and chewy bits of peel.
3 Ways to Remove Tomato Skins
Fresh tomatoes are soft and delicate fruits covered in paper-thin skins that adhere strongly to the flesh.
Since the skins don’t willingly detach, you can’t peel them by hand. And the fruit itself is far too fragile to hold up to the rough handling of a peeler. To remove the skin from a raw tomato, you’d have to cut it away with a knife – which would be time-consuming and inexact. You’d likely waste quite a lot of good parts this way.
Luckily we have much better and more efficient techniques for relieving the tomato of its peel:
- Blanching. Boil for 1 minute and then plunge tomatoes in ice water.
- Roasting. Cut tomatoes in half and bake at 425°F for 30 minutes or once skins split and blacken.
- Freezing. Remove cores and place tomatoes in the freezer for 24 hours, then thaw.
All of these methods work great for de-skinning loads of tomatoes at a time. Each pre-treatment is perfectly viable when you grow determinate tomatoes and the harvest comes in all at once.
But what if you’re growing indeterminate tomatoes? Then it doesn’t really make sense to blanche or roast a handful of tomatoes at a time. When the fruits come in like a trickle over a longer time frame, as vine tomatoes do, the freezing method is the better option.
The Freezer Method for Removing Tomato Skins
Although I do love this treatment for processing tomatoes one at a time, it’s just as practical to do when you have a bunch of tomatoes to peel. Just see how easy it is.
Step 1: Gather tomatoes
Round up one, two, or a dozen or more tomatoes and give them a good rinse with cool water.
Step 2: Cut out the cores
First pull off the stems. With a sharp knife, slice around the core of each tomato and pop it out.
Check over the tomato for blackened bits and bad tissue. If you see any, cut them out too.
Step 3: Place tomatoes in a freezer bag
Now simply place your cleaned, cored, and blemish-free tomatoes into a large freezer bag.
Leave the bag in the freezer for at least 24 hours.
Step 4: Partially thaw them out
When you’re ready to remove the skins and prep the tomatoes for canning, pull the bag out of the freezer. Let the tomatoes thaw out for a few hours on your countertop. Once the skins begin to wrinkle, they are ready to be peeled.
Don’t let them thaw out completely though. It’s much easier to work with them when the fruit is still partially frozen.
Step 5: Pull off the peels
Beginning at the top of the tomato, grasp the skin and pull it away from the fruit. The peel comes away easily in wide strips all the way to the bottom of the tomato.
It helps to wear gloves to protect your fingers from the freezing-cold fruit.
When peeling tomatoes, collect the skins in a separate bowl.
Just like with whole tomatoes, you can dehydrate the peels to make tomato powder. Waste not!
Step 6: Chop them up and cook em
Since the tomatoes are partially frozen, the fruits are still solid and firm. Chopping them up is easier and won’t create a mushy mess on your cutting board.
Sliced, diced, and right into the pot they go where they will melt together into a silky-smooth sauce with the addition of heat.
Or you can put them right back in the freezer for canning on another day. That’s the nice thing about the freezer method – it stops the clock and allows you to choose exactly when you want to spend all day in the kitchen processing your soups, sauces, salsas, and other delicious tomato recipes.
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