Preparing tomatoes

Is your farmers market overflowing with tomatoes?! The state farmers market in Raleigh certainly has plenty of beautiful red, ripe tomatoes. A few weeks ago I came home with a 10lb box of canning tomatoes. Today's post details how I prepared the tomatoes for preserving. I ended up freezing these tomatoes instead of canning. They'll be great for us to have on hand in the colder months. And here's the quick visual for preparing tomatoes:

There are so many decisions to make when preserving tomatoes - such as to peel or not to peel, to deseed or leave the seeds, to stew down or leave raw, or to dice up or leave whole. This process that I used here let me peel the tomatoes, remove the seeds, and preserve them raw which is what I decided would be easiest to work with when I went to use the tomatoes out of the freezer. I froze the seedless, peeled chunked tomatoes in quart bags. 

Preparing and freezing tomatoes is a bit time consuming but definitely worth it in the end! Or at least I think so.