What to do with not-so-good tomatoes

...to avoid store-bought tomatoes all together, using canned when good fresh tomatoes are not available, but sometimes canned tomatoes just aren’t what you need, so you have to wait for summer… or suffer bad tomatoes. Now there’s a middle way. Grocery store tomatoes can be reformed. I gleaned this trick out of the Ottolenghi cookbook, where it is part of a couscous recipe. All you have to do is cut the tomatoes into halves–or quarters if they are ve...

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Grafted Tomatoes: Hope for the Frustrated Home Gardener?

...anaged to kill all your tomatoes this summer you might want to try grafted tomatoes next season. Grafted tomatoes benefit from pathogen resistant rootstock (Maxifort is the most common rootsock variety). A literature review “Yield and fruit quality of grafted tomatoes, and their potential for soil fumigant use reduction. A meta-analysis” by Michael L. Grieneisen, Brenna J. Aegerter, C. Scott Stoddard and Minghua Zhang came to the conclusion, Graft...

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Dookie in the Tomatoes

...mato’s path to our table. Alternately, a blade used to automatically slice tomatoes gets infected with salmonella, thereby spreading the bug to all the other pre-sliced tomatoes headed to the food assemblers (a more accurate term than “chef”) at America’s fast food establishments. 4. After leaving the packing facility, Salmonella infected tomatoes get shipped all over the country and perhaps the world, thereby sentencing thousands of people to mul...

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O79 Growing and Breeding Tomatoes with Fred Hempel

...reeding project over to an eight year old. We also talk about how to water tomatoes and prepare soil. During the podcast Fred mentions: Dumont #4 tweezers And two tomatoes bred by Fred that you can get seeds for: Blush Tomato Orange Jazz tomato I’ve had the pleasure of tasting these tomatoes at a lecture Fred does at the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa and they are really amazing. Fred’s website are: Artisan Seeds and Artisan Seeds in Facebook and Bai...

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Why it’s Better to Pressure Can Tomatoes

...factors are why the recommended hot water bath canning time for raw packed tomatoes is 85 minutes. I’ve hot water bath canned tomatoes and got great results (especially with San Marzano tomatoes). But 85 minutes is a long time. You can cut the processing down considerably and get better results by pressure canning tomatoes. Here’s a raw pack recipe that includes both hot water and pressure canning instructions. Note that you still need to acidify....

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