Hello again, original poster here. Not looking for suggestions with this specific post, just sharing an experience that happened this year for anyone interested or doing research.
2023 I had a sad modest little tomato crop, about 3.5 kg roma type, 2 kg of a multi-purpose green that's shaped like a paste but can be used as a slicer as well, and 2 kg of piennolo. My goal was to preserve them in jars. Reading the ball canning guide (the variation that doesn't can them whole in water, but rather crushed or skinned or whatever) suggests simmering tomatoes before jarring them in order to stop the enzyme from breaking them down and creating a layer of water in the jar. That sounds like a good plan, as I'd like to keep as much of the tomato original as possible.
Life got in the way and I didn't have time to process and jar the tomatoes when they were harvested. I found a few suggestions on the internet which said to freeze the tomatoes, and I had forgotten about this thread. The thinking was to freeze, and come back later to preserve them. Also, I read freezing makes it easy to skin them, so overall this sounded awesome because it was convenient to freeze (at the moment I had freezer space woah) and skinning tomatoes is a monotonous chore I dislike no matter how easy many of you make it out to be. I also did not have time to roast the tomatoes.
I had some time to finally cook myself a meal now few months later, and thought this would be fun experiment on a very small scale to see what happened to the frozen tomatoes. I pulled half a dozen of the roma-type from the freezer, thawed them overnight, and like the internet suggested, they skinned easily. There was, however, a pool of clear water, a raw tomato consomme. I removed the tomatoes from the water, ran them through my food mill. The pulp pretty much disintegrated and I was left with more of a V8 juice-like texture instead of a thick tomato mush. There was also not very much for six roma tomatoes. I was hoping for same amount one gets from a can of whole SM tomatoes. Despite all this, the two results were both delicious (if a bit sweet.. like drinking sugared tomatoes, very interesting).
The plan to freeze and then jar later can still work, but if I combine the consomme I'll likely end up with a layer of water on top. I can separate out the consomme, but then there will be so little end product.
Well, I guess next season I'm going to need to schedule time to actually process the tomatoes if I want to make some shelf-stable preserved tomatoes from my garden. Finding time is not easy for me these days.
I am happy with the decision to at least freeze the tomatoes before cooking, it was a good overall experiment and now I can still enjoy them as long as they last. Just need to find a way to use sugary tomatoes.. they are borderline cloying - it's odd, because when I had a few fresh in August, they were nothing close to this level of sweet.
