Preparing Tomatoes for Spaghetti Sauce, Salsa, or Canning

By pdotson August 9, 2012

Do you have loads of tomatoes and want to make some great Spaghetti Sauce, or Salsa, or want to can tomatoes or tomato juice this is the easy easy to "prep" your tomatoes. I had someone asking me the other day about canning tomatoes and they did not know this step and were not happy with their results with lots of tomatoes skins. I personally don't even like a tomato peel when I am eating a sliced tomato so I really don't want them in my salsa or sauces. This is the easy way to peel tomatoes when you are going to be cooking the tomatoes.

Prep Time : 15 minutes
Cook Time : 35 minutes

Ingredients

Instructions

Bring a pot of water to a boil, the place tomatoes in the boiling water for about 2 minutes, maybe more maybe less. If you have lots of different sized tomatoes try to put like sized in the pot at one time that way the "cooking" time will be the same. Leave the tomatoes in the water until the skins begin to burst or crack like the one below.
TIP: When I have a lot of tomatoes to do I use my pasta pot and and strainer to cook the tomatoes so I can pull them all out at once in the strainer and dump in the ice bath, this tip speeds up the process a bit.
Once you are to this point transfer the tomatoes to a bowl of Ice water, to stop the cooking process. At this point you are just trying to get the peels off not cook the meat of the tomatoes.
TIP: When I am doing a lot of tomatoes, I will use frozen water bottles or frozen lunch box ice packs, they last long and you are not fighting the ice cubes to get to the tomatoes.
Then the peel will just slide off. I keep a knife in my hand while I peel tomatoes. I cute the core out and pull the peel off in just seconds. For Roma tomatoes you can just cut the top off and the meat will just pop out of the skin. Once they are peeled you can dice, blend, juice, stew etc much easier.