Make Your Own Tomato Paste with Homegrown Tomatoes (Canning Recipe)

Hey guys, welcome to the Sunshine Farm. I'm Jen and I want to teach you about how to make tomato paste. Growing up I was never really a big tomato lover but I've always liked ketchup. Every time I looked up a ketchup recipe it always called for tomato paste. Tomato paste is great in things like chili, homemade ketchup, barbecue sauce. There's lots of ways that you can use it and this year I planted so many paste tomatoes. I planted mostly two different varieties of paste tomatoes. The first one is a tomato that was adapted locally to our region called Ten Fingers of Naples. The other one I planted is called the Opaka paste tomato. So if you're wanting to make tomato paste the first thing to think about is do you have the right tomatoes or access to the right kinds of tomatoes. You definitely want paste tomatoes for this because you don't want tomatoes that are too juicy or have too high of a water content. You're really going to be evaporating most of that water out. I'm going to walk you through how I made tomato paste. You're going to need paste tomatoes. You're going to need sea salt or salt and you're going to need some olive oil. You're also going to want to have something that you can use as a food mill. Ideally this will make your job so much easier. You're going to need some mason jars or canning jars if you do want to preserve it and store it. A large stock pot and a couple of pans. So here's where you're going to start. Go ahead and take all your lovely tomatoes. I used about 25 pounds of tomatoes each time I made tomato paste and 25 pounds made about two pints. It seems crazy that 25 pounds of tomatoes turns into just two pints but it will be worth it when you can have that homemade ketchup. So you're going to take 25 pounds of paste tomatoes. You're going to wash them and then you're going to pass them through a food mill if you have one. If you don't have a food mill you can take a more complicated route and that's going to involve putting the tomatoes in hot water and then taking the skins off and then passing the remaining tomato through a strainer to get the seeds out. So for a food mill I actually use a KitchenAid attachment for my mixer and that works perfectly for tomatoes. There's a couple different attachments that you need to add on to your mixer to be able to do this but it's really a game changer. I've loved using it so far. So I passed the tomatoes through the food mill and I ended up with a stock pot completely full of essentially tomato juice. Now once you pass those through the food mill and you have your sauce in a stock pot you're going to boil that tomato juice for quite a few hours until it's reduced at least 50 percent. I like to reduce it more like 60 to 70 percent until it's like a really thick almost like almost like the consistency of ketchup. Once it's nice and thick then you can take it from the stock pot and you're actually going to divide the remaining sauce onto two pans that you're going to put in the oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. So here's where you use some olive oil lightly drizzle some olive oil on each of the pans and then you're going to pour the tomato sauce evenly divide it into two pans and spread it. Put it in the oven for probably about 30 to 40 minutes take it out and re-spread it and you're going to do this probably four or five maybe even six times until you start to see the sauce become paste like and turn brick red. It might take a little bit of getting used to. It was pretty clear when it became paste like because of the change from the bright red to the darker brick red. The most important thing here as you're re-spreading it and taking it out of the oven every 20 minutes or so is you're going to be making sure that it's spread evenly. You don't want any areas too thin and if it's too thick it's just going to take a little bit longer so you want to evenly spread it out. After that you're almost done. Go ahead and fill up a large stock pot with water and start boiling the water so that you can water bath candies to preserve them and then you're going to pour about a couple teaspoons of lemon juice to the bottom of your jars. That's to make sure the acidity is sufficiently high enough so that bacteria doesn't have a chance to grow and you know your tomato paste is safe for storage for a year. Once you have your lemon juice in your jars you can start to pack the paste into the jars. You're going to want some kind of utensil. You could use like a little knife or a spoon. This works really handy. It comes in the canning accessory kit from Ball Canning and it just helps you pack it in so you're getting rid of those air gaps because the more air the more chance of bacteria growing inside the jars and that also decreases the chance that it's going to get a good seal when you put it in the hot water bath. So you're going to pack it really well and then you're going to leave about a half inch to three quarters head space on the top of your jar. Once they're packed in the jar make sure you put your new lids on and take your little ring and secure it pretty tight so that you can tight enough that you can do with your hands and then you're going to go ahead and put these in your boiling water in your stock pot or it can be a canner it doesn't matter for hot water bath canning and you're going to go ahead and put that in the water make sure there's at least an inch or two of water covering the jar and you're going to process it for 15 minutes so set your timer for 15 minutes go ahead take it out when that timer runs up give it about 24 hours or so before you mess with the jar at all leave it alone for 24 hours after you take it out of the water bath canner make sure the jar properly seals the way you can tell is if you press down on it it doesn't give at all if it's sealed you can go ahead you can write the information you need on the can I just put tomato paste because that's what it is take off those rings you don't want to store your canned goods with the rings on and you can go ahead and store them and use them for up to a year soon hopefully I am going to be sharing how we make homemade ketchup using homemade tomato paste from homegrown tomatoes to put on our homegrown potatoes if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up you can subscribe to our channel for all kinds of plant-based recipes and plant-based homesteading and if you want to be alerted when we post a new video you can go ahead and hit that bell thanks for being here I'll see you guys next time