Basic Stewed Tomatoes (Substitute for Canned Tomatoes)

Far, far too many recipes call for a can of tomatoes--whole, crushed, diced, pureed, you name it. I'm guessing that a large majority of us can't get a can of tomatoes or if we can it might be pricey. Especially with fall here, I have a lot of soup recipes that ALL call for canned tomatoes in some fashion. So, before the tomatoes look terrible (which they do around here in the winter!), I decided to get some in my freezer that I can then just thaw and use in place of a can if a recipe calls for it. Have you guessed by now that I have a deep freeze in addition to the little one my fridge provides??? But, whether you have freezer space or not, this is how you can get a substitute for a can of tomatoes by using fresh ones. This will also make a great start to a pasta sauce or marinara.

Basic Stewed Tomatoes (Substitute for Canned Tomatoes)

First wash your tomatoes well. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Also prepare a bowl of iced water. Put tomatoes in the boiling water for about a minute.

I used my sink for this because of the number of tomatoes I was doing. I just poured the boiling water over them. You'll start moving the tomatoes to the iced water as soon as the skins start to split. Some of my tomatoes took much longer than 1 minute for this to happen and some never split. After a couple minutes I moved them anyway. 

Once tomatoes have cooled down in the ice water, remove them. The skins will just slide off for the most part. I didn't even use a knife except to pierce some of the skins that didn't split themselves.

After tomatoes have been skinned, you'll core out the hard centers with a knife. If you want your sauces and soups to not have seeds, you can then run your knife or fingers around the inside a bit to de-seed.

This is one of my rather mutilated tomatoes that I got seeds out of. It doesn't matter though for what you're doing with these!

I moved all my skinned, cored, and de-seeded tomatoes into a pot. You can't see it, but I'm not a perfectionist about removing seeds. I just get most of them out and don't worry about the rest. I broke tomatoes into quarters or so when I put them in the pot.

After getting out everything, there was quite a lot of tomato juice in my bowl. My colander had small enough slats that I just poured all the seeds, cores and skins in there to let the juice drain back in with the tomatoes.

At this point, you can just freeze the tomatoes and juice as they are, or if you want to cook them a bit, you can. I chose to stew mine just a little. Actually, all I did was bring the pot of tomatoes and juice to an almost boil and then cut them off and let them sit until they were cool. I'll use mine for sauces and soups so a little cooking on the front end won't hurt them and I feel like they keep a better texture in the freezer this way. If I wasn't freezing them, I probably wouldn't worry too much about it one way or the other. I did add about 2 teaspoons of salt. You could also put in diced onions, garlic, etc if you were wanting this to be more than just tomatoes.

I put 2 cups in each ziplock, trying to make sure I had a good mix of liquid and solid tomatoes in each. This would be the same amount as a 14-15oz can of tomatoes. I just left mine in chunks and pieces, but if you wanted, you could dice them or crush them more or even puree them before freezing them. If you're using them immediately, the same thing would apply. Just make them in whatever form your recipe calls for. For example, if putting them in a cream of tomato soup, you'd probably want to puree them. 

Whether you are doing a bunch to freeze or not, the beginning of the process is perfect for quickly getting the skins off tomatoes before using them in soups and sauces. 

I bought about Y30 (<$5) worth of fresh tomatoes (about 10 pounds) and got the equivalent of 8 cans (16 cups) of stewed tomatoes.