Summer brings a bounty of food from the garden. Our first year we had so much zucchini I wanted to shoot myself in the face if I had to come up with one more novel way to camouflage it in regular recipes. This year my wife went cuckoo for tomatoes. We have at least a dozen types of tomatoes growing around the garden, from a tidy row of heirlooms growing out of soil bags (an experiment on which the jury is still out) to a mystery tomato growing with gusto out the side of the compost pile, to an ancient two-year old black Krim heirloom that has a woody stem that looks like Medusa’s head, but still pumps out truckloads of fruit. What to do with all these tomatoes? Make sauce!
We started with four pounds of tomatoes, which were rendered into five cups of sauce by the KitchenAid pulper/pulverizer/grinder/masher attachment on our stand mixer. From those five cups of sauce my wife made up two jars of sauce we put in the freezer because it just wasn’t worth getting all the canning crap out for two little jars. I’m wondering when we’ll ever have enough tomatoes ripe at one time to actually make a big batch of sauce. While you ponder the improbable math of two pounds of tomatoes for one small jar of tomato sauce, please enjoy this video of the food mill pooping out tomato detritus.
[flickr video=5957705141]
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Not sure I’d eat anything that looks so gross coming out of that food mill…I’ll take your word for it that it tastes good. I’ve had to barter for tomatoes from my neighbor in exchange for pickles I made because my tomatoes are so bad this year. Wish I had about 10 lbs. of YOUR tomatoes! Need pickles??
Actually that’s the tomato waste (seeds/skins) coming out in tube form. Just visible in the background is the sauce dripping into a stock pot.
Babs–we don’t eat the tomato poop either. LOL.