Friday, August 6, 2010

Losing It

I've been losing the battle with my counter. I do love the new counter. It is huge compared to my old one. But my husband tells me if there is a horizontal surface I will find a way to cover it. It was slowly being taken over by mostly solanums with a few alliums and legumes thrown in for good measure.

Yesterday I dealt with the huge poundage of tomatillos. Today I tackled the tomatoes. This time red salsa. Or more precisely Annie's Salsa (not Granny's dog mind you, but a different Annie). I'd never made it before. It gets rave reviews, but occasionally someone doesn't like it. I liked it quite well. Yum. It took forever to make, just like the Salsa Verde yesterday. Sadly even with that pile of tomatoes I didn't have enough for a full recipe. I did 3/4 of it. The paste isn't mine, but I did make the sauce to add in. And I ignored the sweet peppers and made them all jalapenos and serranos. My jalapenos are almost sweet. I wish the serranos had punched up the heat a bit more, but sadly the finished product is a bit too mild. I think if I mixed it with Granny's last batch, I'd have perfection.

I had a lot of kinds of tomatoes in this salsa. I'm really trying to find the best canning tomato for me. Well I found a clear winner in the taste category. Heinz 2653. But I'll go down all the tomatoes. And no photos. I peeled them all before I even thought of it.

First I have three Chinese heirlooms that I'm growing - two of which have ripe tomatoes, Early Kus Ali and Hong Yuen. They all say they are good all around tomatoes and make great canners and great sauce. Well I beg to differ. The taste is fine, but not spectacular. They do not hold up to saucing. The typical way to make sauce (or tomatoes for salsa) is to put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes then peal them and take out their guts (seeds and gel). These tomatoes don't have a thick skin. They have a very thin skin and lots of gel. They are definitely not saucing tomatoes. Hong Yuen is a good canner for a whole tomatoes. The tomatoes are relatively small and they are so cute skinned. If I hadn't needed every bit of tomato I could muster I would have canned them whole.

Then I had a handful of real paste tomatoes, San Marzano, Opalka, Amish Paste, and Heinz. San Marzano and Opalka were fairly similar. Their taste was OK, but not great. They were dry as paste tomatoes should be. They both had a similar shape which was elongated and thinner on top. Amish Paste stood out as a good fresh eating tomatoes. It can't hold a candle to something like Cherokee Purple but very good. It had more gel than the other paste tomatoes which could have been the reason. The gel holds a lot of the flavor for fresh eating tomatoes. Amish paste is a slightly elongated tomato with a point at the tip and a decent size for paste tomatoes.

Then came Heinz. It was in a class by itself. The tomatoes were a bit smaller than the other, but it was dry. It didn't taste sweet but had a very full rich acidic flavor to it. It is by no means an fresh eating tomatoes. It is not sweet enough for that and has no juice. But as a paste tomato it far outclassed the others in the pack. It is an early determinate, but doesn't seem to be holding up well to the diseases of the area. It could just be because of the heat. It is supposed to be a good tomato for cooler weather, which means good for our usual years.

I had two others that I used - Market Miracle and Cherokee Purple. It is kind of a shame to put Cherokee Purple into a sauce as it is so good for eating fresh, but I needed every tomato I could get. It takes the prize this year on fresh eating flavor and beauty. Market Miracle wasn't quite as tasty as it was last year. I think it shines more as a cool weather tomato than a hot weather tomato. Also last year it wasn't in the shade of a freakishly tall determinate.

Two tomatoes have been left out of this taste/use test. Romeo is maybe the largest paste tomato you can grow. I guess that makes it easy to process. It is a bit later. It is also the weirdest tomato I have. Its vines are very bendy. They don't like to go up. If it could crawl on the ground it would be happy. Also it doesn't put out a great deal of thick foliage like most tomatoes. It is scraggly. In addition some tomatoes are shaped differently. Some are plum shaped some more oxheart like Amish Paste is. The other is Peiping Chieh. It is the other Chinese heirloom and hasn't gotten ripe yet. I hope the wait is worth it.

And after I was done clearing off a good amount of space on the counter, I made the mistake of going outside to chase a squirrel away from the tomatoes. I saw six tomatoes knocked off on the ground. So now the counter incursion is starting again.

24 comments:

  1. Talk about filling up some counter top space! Thanks alot for describing your experiences with the various kinds of tomatoes grown this year. That's valuable stuff to know...

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  2. I'm also waiting on yield info to make any lasting decisions. That will take another month to get though. I wonder if the determinate can outdo the indeterminates in yield or it whether it will be lacking in that department.

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  3. I love having every available surface covered in produce! I canned whole tomatoes today, Annie's salsa will have to wait until I'm more comfortable with what I have in the basement.

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  4. tomatoes, so many tomatoes, so little counter. All I can say is I am extremely jealous! Great sauce making work though :) I'll be making tomato sauce today - though I have to buy my tomatoes from the markets.

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  5. I'm fighting this battle as we speak! We've got 22 pints of Annie's Salsa and 19 pints of Annie's Peach Twist (half of the tomatoes replaced with peaches). This was my first year making either and they're really good!

    I'm still looking for my favorite sauce tomato, but the Black Plums have made the best tasting salsa this year. I'll have to find some of the Heinz seeds.

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  6. Me too! So glad to hear others have the same problem. I have pumpkins already. I just love to have them on the counter. I love vegetables that keep well. Onions, garlic, potatoes too. I can admire them and feel no urgency to use them. And gradually the counters fill...

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  7. I wish my one zucchini would just stop, and my tomatoes would start. I have way too many cherry tomatoes, but not enough larger ones for even a half batch of salsa, and I'm completely out. I look at the loaded determinates I put in my neighbor's yard, and then I look at my wimpy (fruit wise, not size wise) indeterminates and wish I'd reversed everything. I think most of my salsa tomatoes came from the determinates last year. Yours look gorgeous, as does your salsa. I'm jellus.

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  8. Wow, I am so jealous of your tomato harvest. Looks awesome. That salsa is yummy too.

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  9. Thanks for the taste test info. Ours are taking forever in Boise. We've only gotten a few cherries and one black krim which was delicious. We appear to have hundreds on the way though.

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  10. The Mom, I have trouble cooking when they take over too much. I like to keep up just a bit. I do love looking at all the tomatoes though. I still have my cherries that aren't going anywhere.

    prue, Last year I bought the tomatoes for my salsa. I wasn't growing any paste tomatoes. I decided I really needed to grow mostly pastes.

    megan/mason, Annie's Peach Twist sounds really yummy. Too bad I don't have a peach tree up and producing yet. Black Plums sound like they would make an interesting salsa. I love the complex flavor of black tomatoes.

    kathy, Usually I don't get this way until mid to late August. It is an early invasion for me. I want to get some pretty baskets for all the produce. Mac has such nice ones.

    Annie's Granny, I usually get more tomatoes off my indeterminates, but some years can make life strange. At least this year I only have three cherries (I planted four but pulled one). I'm still wondering if it is worth it to make sauce out of them. Last year I did when I had 7 cherries. I really need only two.

    meemsnyc, thanks

    GonferalinID, It shouldn't be too long before you get inundated too.

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  11. Your counter looks like my island. I don't think it's been clear for more then an hour or two the past few weeks. Happy Canning!!

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  12. I got Peiping Chieh's from wintersown -- they are very prone to cracking but quite productive. Ours have been ripening since last month...ok for sauce, ok to eat. Just ok. real middle-of-the-road.

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  13. I suffer from the same horizontalitis Daphne. Your problem is much better however... your tomatoes look delicious. Alas I am allergic to those too. Beautiful counter. ;>)

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  14. My counter is filling up as well. I was finally able to freeze some ripe tomatoes and make some salsa yesterday.

    I appreciate your evaluation of paste tomatoes as they are usually the majority of the tomatoes I grow for sauces and salsa. I am hoping to add more variety in the future.

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  15. Lovely problem to have! I wish I had it in fact! I am just getting ones and twos of ripe tomatoes from my determinate and early started Siletz tomatoes. Everything else is fruiting but quite a ways off from producing ripe fruit. (sigh). I only hope that they beat the onslaught of fall cold rains and that I get at least one good flush of ripe fruit (hopefully more but at this point I am worried about even getting just one).

    Annie's salsa recipe is very good. I have also made it before and really liked it.

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  16. Over at Skippy's Vegetable Garden someone commented that squirrels go after tomatoes when they don't have a water source.

    I have a couple of ground level birdbaths on my deck, my neighbor has a tiny shallow pool as part of his koi pond, and the tomatoes are unmolested.

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  17. Thank you for the detailed info about different tomato varieties! I love these personal reviews of tomato varieties. I would love to have about half of your "problems" but for now, I guess I just have to settle for my two tomatoes. :)

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  18. This is my first time growing the amish pastes, I was impressed by their taste for fresh eating. (Mine are being turned into 'gourmet' ketchup!)

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  19. I feel like such a know it nothing when it comes to tomatoes. The cherries taste sweet and mellow, but the others taste like...well, a tomato.

    I do want to try to dry some. Have you ever tried it and do you have a special type or will any tomato work?

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  20. Whoa, that's a lot of canning, I'm jealous of your tomatoes, but I don't envy the work of processing them ;)

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  21. I am definitely jealous. This should be my kitchen at this time of year, but I only have a few hardly ripe tomatoes yet. Congratulations! I love this photo of your counter.

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  22. Wow, all those tomatoes! I've only picked two so far, the rest are still green. Seems my late start was not such a good idea :-) Salsa looks good.

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  23. So you make tomato sauce with the seeds still in? My recipe says to take them out, but maybe I'll try your way with the next batch.

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  24. No I take the seeds out of my tomato sauce. The photo you see is the salsa which is why it has seeds (hot peppers seeds).

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