Canning Whole Tomatoes The Way Italian Grandmas Have Been Doing it For Centuries

what's going on guys it's luke from the on my gardener channel here with another very exciting episode for you today in today's episode i'm going to show you how to take tomatoes right from the garden and turn them into the most beautiful authentic whole canned tomatoes that you've ever seen so in this episode like i said we're going to do it authentically the reason why is because i like making authentic napoli style pizza i absolutely love neopolitan style pizza because it's something that connects us to a culture that has done this for centuries it's something that i really like to do because food is what connects us and in order to connect to their culture you have to connect to their food and that means using the most authentic ingredients and the most authentic methods so that you can you know best replicate that and turn an eating experience rather than just a meal time into a journey you know you're traveling over to italy and you're tasting their food the way that it's been tasted the way that it's been prepared and the way that it's tasted for hundreds of years and so i really love that and it's just something that i've always had a passion for so one of the things when i'm making an italian style pizza that i always run into is that when you're using tomatoes that have been canned in the u.s using the standardized methods of food preservation that we have it's slightly underwhelming it's not that it's you know not amazing pizza is great but it's slightly underwhelming and that's because there's a lot missing there's a lot that's added that's uh you know an italian grandma would say is not necessary there's a lot of things that are done that are a little bit over the top um and i i say that just because it's my own personal opinion i think in the us here we can tend to kind of get a little over uh overly sanitary if that's okay for me to say i think it's probably pretty well known that you know we're very sanitary here in the u.s and it can lead us to really sacrifice a lot of things with food quality and flavor because of those kind of heightened sanitary requirements and so by no means do i sacrifice food safety and by no means what i would i serve this on a pizza in like a restaurant because it's not you know it's not to the book of what is required this is just for our household and it's something that i use and i enjoy but like i said you have to understand that this is not by the book this is not by the ball canning book this comes right from italian grandmas over in italy and the thing that i've always kind of had a question of and that i've just questioned in general is if there's a culture that's been doing this for hundreds of years and the u.s says don't do this it's very dangerous you'd expect there to be thousands if not millions of italian grandmas dropping dead from you know foodborne illnesses but they don't and they still do it to this day and there's many videos that you can even watch on youtube of authentic italian grandmas that are making authentically canned tomatoes and i love that i just love kind of learning from them and emulating what they do because they have something to share and and i just like learning and i've taken those methods i've used them and i can safely say i really enjoy them it gives the tomatoes a rich body that's just minerally it's it's balanced with acidity and sweetness it's not overly salty and it's not very basic one of the things about u.s canned tomatoes are that there's kind of a basicness to them they're just very just acidic and there's not a lot of mineralness and a lot of richness and that could also be because the tomatoes are not grown in mineral-rich soil they're just kind of grown in whatever soil they'll grow in and they're not fed a really well-balanced diet of minerals like they are in italy when they're grown on the side of a volcanic mountain you know you're not getting those all those minerals that are in the soil and and that can definitely contribute to some of the flavors but it's also you know the fact that so many of them are canned in aluminum cans there's so many of them that are uh using just basic iodized salt or um you know or like canning salt whereas these recipes use sea salt you know just beautiful rich sea salt as natural as it comes with all the minerals included in it you know it uses whole basil leaves right from the garden whole basil leaves that have been washed mind you it's important to wash your stuff it also includes fresh home-grown paste tomatoes we have san marzano's which are the most authentic as you can get tomatoes we also have some pizzano we also have some roma and we also have some some mopalka in here as well just a good a good mix but very very authentic tomatoes for this recipe and we also use glass jars and this is again something that has come from italian grandmas over in italy so if you disagree with this and you just you find this to be uh conflicting or difficult for you to put on your family's table i understand there's a lot of a lot of fear based around food safety and i just i always say you know do your research do what you feel safe and um and no one is forcing you to do this i just wanted to share with you what i was doing because i posted over on facebook what i was doing and it caused a lot of uh well caused a lot of concern on one one part of the party and then the other part of the party was like i want to learn i want to see what you're doing this looks incredible looks absolutely beautiful and and so that's why i'm doing this today you know not to not to ruffle any feathers just to show you what i'm doing so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to rinse my tomatoes then i'm going to dump out the water rinse them again and then repeat a third time i just want to get all the dirt and grime off of the tomatoes so that they're as clean as possible now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to drop my tomatoes whole tomatoes right into the boiling pot of water i need to boil them for about 30 to 45 seconds but no more than that we don't want them to be mushy but we just want the skin to slightly separate from the inside flash alright in the go we're gonna do these in batches because i don't want to cool the water off too much i want to keep it real nice and hot also make sure you peel off all the uh all the tomato but the the stems on the tomatoes okay we just got a colander here inside of another bowl to catch any drips and we're just gonna take the slotted spoon the tomatoes out of the boiling water that way we can keep the the water boiling for the second batch of tomatoes the thing you want to look for is you want to look for the bottom of the tomato the very tip of the tomato to kind of have like a wrinkly pruning look to it as you can see that's the separation that we're looking for we don't want them to be mushy we just want them to be lightly separating from the from the tomatoes so we can push the skin right off okay now while the tomatoes are still hot what we want to do is we want to take a paring knife and just trim the top shoulders off the tomato discard that go to the compost pile we take our fingers we make a ring these are pretty hot still just take a ring and then just push from the from the bottom of the tomato up there we go just like that sometimes if they're a little if they're a little on the on the tough side they don't want to slide off but there we go this one's just popping right off there see that skin is so thick on these paste tomatoes that it basically is like i said it's just like a sock take that top off push it right out there we go now the italian grandmas they take their thumb and pinch off that stem and do it that way oh that is way too hot for me to i like the knife method but if you're doing it authentically i mean you might as well do it 100 right but no i i can only yeah i can only handle so much it's so hot this one's a little green on top i'm going to cut this one all right and then we're just going to take a little bit of salt and sprinkle over top of the tomatoes this is going to help to draw out some of that moisture so that there's not as much water or juice in the can when it comes to the canning process we're going to let this sit for about 10 minutes to start drawing some of that moisture out and then we'll uh we'll strain it through a colander so that way we have just the tomatoes and all the juice is going to go down the drain okay now we're just going to take the tomatoes as you can see look at all that water that comes out from the salt we're going to dump dump those in the colander and that way i can get all that liquid out and moisture will still continue as the salt soaks into the tomatoes it'll still continue to draw some moisture out but this is getting a lot of that moisture out that's just really unnecessary what you can do is you can actually take the bowl that you had them in originally and and this way you can just keep them on the side as you're processing them up they're going to continue draining into this bowl here so about 20 minutes ago we started our stock pot this is going to be our hot water bath here we had to use a stock pot because we're using quart jars and you need about an inch or two of water above the top of the jar to properly to properly can them so what we're going to do is we're just going to get this up to a rolling boil that way we can take our jars already packed with tomatoes and put them right into boiling water that way we're not waiting on this thing to come up to temperature which can take 15-20 minutes to get that much water boiling so we did that ahead of time and now all we have to do is pack our jars let's go okay now comes the fun part so what we're going to do is we're going to take just a basil leaf put it in the bottom we're going to take our tomatoes we're going to set them in as neatly as possible even with wide mouth big hand problems so we're just going to pack them in there as close as we can because you don't want a whole lot of air space or a whole lot of you know gaps which will cause some air space just to keep packing these in here and if you crush them a little bit that's totally fine you're going to release some good juices and when you get about half full to three quarters full what you want to do is you want to take some more basil leaves again these are washed basil leaves and they're whole basil leaves i know a lot of you guys worried about using basil leaves a lot of the ball canning books say don't use whole basil leaves because it can affect the ph and stuff like that and i'm not necessarily a subscriber to that i mean it might but again italian grammars just keep remembering that you know italian grammars have been doing this exactly this way for hundreds of years and if there was an issue they wouldn't be doing it for hundreds of years so all right now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take a teaspoon and a half of salt this is slightly more salt than a normal than a normal recipe of canned tomatoes and that's because the salt is going to help to kill a lot of the bacteria and create an inhospitable environment for things like mold and stuff like that so it's going to help to sterilize your food and keep it you know keep it food safe so throw another basil leaf in there for good measure and then continue packing the jars now we're not using any olive oil we're not using any vinegar we're not using any lemon juice we're just going to use the juice from the tomatoes and the tomatoes themselves we're going to pack these in as close as possible and you gotta just really cram it in there so these ones on top are gonna start busting open but you gotta fill the jar all the way up to the top there we go all right there we go and as you can see we have our head space so it's not going to be overflowing and all we're going to do is wipe the rim down put on our lid and our ring put it in hot water bath and we'll be good to go finger tight no more than finger tight we're good to go look at how beautiful that is and the thing is since we're packing these in a vacuum the basil is going to stay green a lot of times people wonder if the basil is going to turn nice and and you know dark brown or black and it doesn't these were already finished and as you can see the basil has kept its color absolutely beautiful all right and we're almost done the last thing we have to do is just let our jars sit in the hot water bath for up to 40 minutes if you're using pints which are smaller you need 30 minutes quartz which is what we're using 40 minutes this way they're all going to be up to temperature and properly sterilized and the food inside should be safe once we pull them out we don't want them to cool very quickly so we want to do is cover them with like a blanket or a thick towel something that's going to help insulate and help the jars to slowly cool that way there's no thermal shock and cracking and then the very final thing we have to do is after a couple days we want to remove the rings it's very important we do this because the rings can set on top of the the lids and if there is any botulism or food spoilage the the uh the seal will break but if the ring is on the lid you can't really tell if anything has gone wrong so you got to take the ring off and that way if the seal is compromised the lid will just pop right off instead of needing a lot of force to break it off and break that seal and that's a great way to know if your food inside is safe to eat but again i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new this is definitely again not by the book but it's how italian grandmas have been doing this for hundreds of years and i really trust them i love them i have a lot of respect for what they do and it really truly does make all the difference on a pizza so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new and as always this is luke from the mi gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home we'll catch you all later see ya bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 215,148

Keywords: preserving, tomato, age old, heirloom, Premiere_Elements_2018, roma, tutorial, italian, organic, canning tomatoes, centuries, canned tomatoes, san marzano, how to, canned, pizza

Id: 2rv_IdeOO4Q

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019