Homemade tomato paste! Or, how to take 4 dozen of your hard-won garden fresh tomatoes and reduce them to 4 half-cup jars.
The pictures on this page really do show just how many tomatoes went into these four very small jars — to add insult to injury, the first time we made this, we only got three jars even, as shown. Hardly worth even firing up the canner for.
Is it worth it? Only you can decide that for yourself. But here’s an oven-roasted version from Ball — oven roasting is a nice alternative to long, steamy stove-top simmering sessions, at least.
If you’d prefer a stove-top simmering version, the National Center for Home Food Preservation has one. It also seems to promise a better yield, too.
See also: Tomato paste made from tomato powder
The recipe
If you wish to double or triple the batch, just do the math first on paper.
Jar size choices: 125 ml (4 oz) jars
Processing method: Either water-bath or steam canning
Yield: 4 x 125 ml (4 oz) jars
Headspace: 1 cm (¼ inch)
Processing time: 40 minutes. Adjust time for altitude when over 300 metres / 1000 feet.
Roasted Tomato Paste
Ingredients
- 6 kg roma tomatoes (12 lbs)
- 1 tablespoon salt (OR non-bitter, non-clouding salt sub;. optional)
- 4 tablespoons lemon juice (bottled. OR 1 teaspoon citric acid)
Instructions
- Heat oven to 175 C / 350 F.
- Wash tomatoes, core.
- Cut tomatoes in half.
- Squeeze or scoop seeds out of tomatoes.
- Place tomato halves cut side down on baking sheets in single layers.
- Roast tomatoes until skins are wrinkly and starting to char.
- Remove tomatoes from oven, let cool until safe to handle.
- Remove skins by pinching skins off tomato halves.
- Process tomato halves in food processor until smooth.
- Put tomato purée in a bowl. Stir in salt (if using) and either the citric acid OR the lemon juice.
- Spread the purée out on a baking sheet.
- Bake at 175 C / 350 F until.
- Every 20 to 30 minutes, stir the purée with particular attention to the edges to prevent burning.
- The paste is done when it is very thick, and a dark red.
- Put hot tomato paste into heated 125 ml (4 oz) jars.
- Leave 1 cm (¼ inch) headspace.
- Debubble, adjust headspace.
- Wipe jar rims.
- Put lids on.
- Process in a water bath canner or steam canner.
- Process jars for 40 minutes. Increase time as needed for your altitude.
Nutrition
Reference information
How to water bath process.
When water-bath canning or steam canning, you must adjust the processing time for your altitude.
How to steam can.
For salt substitute, Herbamare Sodium-Free was used as it is non-bitter and non-clouding.
Recipe notes
- Instead of Roma, you can use another paste-type tomato.
- The citric acid / lemon juice, and the heat processing, is what assures the safety of this recipe. Don’t skip either step.
- For the tomatoes, you will need 40 to 45 large Roma tomatoes.
- Instead of Roma, you can use another paste-type tomato.
- Ended up with 2 litres / quarts of tomato purée to spread out on the baking sheet.
- We lined the baking sheet with tin foil for easier cleanup.
- Use one baking sheet to bake the purée on. It might seem like a good idea to divide the purée over 2 sheets, for faster cooking. However, for one batch, we found that doing so caused it to be so thin that patches evaporated completely away leaving just an unrecoverable red film sticking to the baking sheet.
- We found that an hour was sufficient time to reduce the purée to a paste. It may depend on how “hot” your oven runs. If you have a fan-assisted / convection oven, that may speed things up.
- Very hard to keep air pockets out of the paste in the jars completely. Squishing one down on one side causes another to appear on the other side.
Recipe source
Roasted Tomato Paste. In: Butcher, Meredith L., Ed. The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving. New York: Oxmoor House. 2016. Page 206.
Modifications made:
- None.
Nutrition information
Per 1 tablespoon:
- 17 calories, 111 mg sodium
Without salt, sodium is 5 mg per tablespoon.
* Nutrition info provided by MyFitnessPal
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