Mission Success!

9/17/09: Freezing Bell Peppers and Tomato Puree

Fall harvesting can be the most wonderful time of the year, but when you have to do about 24 quarts of peppers and half a deep freezer full of tomato puree, sometimes it seems like it is mission impossible. But me and my sisters succeeded and managed to do all of this in four hours. Whew! What a job!

I wanted to write down some notes here because we had a hard time remembering how much to freeze when we started out!

Tomatoes:

• Used Super Marzano (aka Roma) tomatoes for the puree, four 5-gallon buckets in all.
• Was able to fill the large stock pot, the corn pot, and the 8-quart pot.
• Took us about two hours to do puree from start to finish.
• In the end, we managed to have 26 quarts of puree.

Peppers:

• Used long and square bell peppers, four 5-gallon buckets in all.
• We noticed that the long bell peppers (the Big Early and Giant Marconi varieties) were easier to cut up because they had less seeds.
• Took us about two hours to do.
• In the end, we had 23 1/2 quart bags of peppers.

For those who have never frozen tomato puree or peppers, you should really give it a go! To make tomato puree, my family uses a Squeezo machine, like the one seen here. We then let the puree simmer for a couple hours, let cool, and then pour it into freezer containers.

The peppers are a lot easier to do. We simply chop them up as if we were to cook with them, place them in a freezer bag, then freeze flat. Really that easy, and we have been doing it for as long as I can remember!

Here are a couple photos of our tomatoes and peppers straight off my family's farm. They were taken in 2005.