Ways to Preserve Fresh Tomatoes

If you have been following this blog since the beginning (thanks family and friends!) you maybe (but probably don’t haha) remember that my first ever post was about having too many tomatoes from the garden. Tomatoes have been something that I have loved to grow. I have learned a lot about ways to preserve them over the years. While I haven’t tried everything, I do have a few favorite ways to preserve tomatoes that I would like to share with you!

Spaghetti Sauce

Spaghetti is one of my favorite “quick meals.” We always bought ready-made spaghetti sauce, so decided to try making it ourselves! One of the coolest things about making your own sauce is that you can season it however you like! For example, garlic causes stomach issues for my husband and some of my in-laws, so it is nice to be able to make a tasty sauce that doesn’t include garlic!

Another awesome thing about this sauce is that it can be easily canned by using a water bath… no pressure cooking! You can read my post about easy water bath canning here! We just finished our last jar of sauce from 2021, so it lasted all year and was still delicious!

You can get my recipe here! Feel free to edit it to make it your own!

Tomato Sauce

We wanted to preserve some tomato sauce that we could use for a variety of things. We just boiled down the sauce from the tomatoes (created using the Sauce Master) and added a little salt. Once it was as thick as we wanted it, we water bath canned it just as sauce.

We plan to make a soup from some, season it to use as pizza sauce, and use as a sauce for meatballs and meatloaf by mixing with brown sugar and honey. This could also be seasoned into spaghetti sauce if we run out!

Salsa

Salsa is another treat that can be easily canned using a water bath! Just be sure to use a recipe meant for water bath canning to ensure it is safe to preserve this way!

My husband and I really enjoy salsa with our burritos or tacos. Toss some chicken breasts in a crock pot with a jar of salsa and shred once the meat reaches the proper temperature for an awesome burrito meat!

We have had a lot of fun taste testing and perfecting our salsa recipe to our liking. You can get our recipe here! We planted parts of our garden based on this recipe!

Freeze in Quarters

My husband’s grandparents did this with a bunch of tomatoes last year! They washed and quartered the tomatoes and laid them out on a cookie sheet to freeze for a couple of hours then put into freezer bags. They used them for chili, but I’m sure there are many things these can be used for! We have not tried this method of preserving personally, but they make excellent chili, so I’m confident it works 🙂

Other Ideas (I’ve seen but not tried)

• roast the tomatoes and make soup to freeze
• roast and can the tomatoes whole or in quarters
• Freeze tomatoes whole or chopped to preferred size

I’m sure there are many other ways to preserve your tomatoes, but these are the methods we use to preserve ours! Have other ideas or methods that you have used? Let me know in the comments! 🙂