• Freezing tomatoes: an experiment

The canned tomatoes I usually use for soups and sauces come from California – not an ideal product for an aspiring localvore. I have always considered home-grown tomatoes too precious to use in anything cooked, and prefer to eat them raw. But this week I had a pantry shelf covered with red tomatoes picked before a frost warning, and some were starting to rot. Generally I am not ambitious enough to transform my kitchen into a food-production cannery, or maybe it’s just that the whole process intimidates me. I decided to take the lazy localvore’s way out and try freezing tomatoes whole.

Google proved to be a wealth of information about freezing tomatoes. Most resources recommended blanching them and removing the skins and seeds. That sounded like far too much work. I remembered reading in Mother Earth News that it was possible to freeze whole tomatoes raw, skins and all. I found what I wanted at a website called Tomato Casual. The instructions are brief, because the process is so easy:

Keep in mind that you should always start with firm, ripe, deep red tomatoes and always wash them and cut away the stem scars and any imperfections before beginning. 

Freezing tomatoes with skins on:

Simply place the clean, groomed tomatoes on cookie sheets and then in the freezer. When the tomatoes are frozen, transfer them to plastic freezer bags or other freezer-safe containers. When you’re ready to use them, take out as many as you’ll need and simply run them under warm water; the skins should come off easily.

Now this sounded like something I could handle! I decided to freeze the tomatoes on a cookie sheet and transfer them to a ziplock bag when they were frozen, like I do with berries. A whole cookie sheet seemed too heavy and unwieldy, though, so I used a toaster-oven pan.

Raw, de-stemmed tomatoes on toaster-oven pan

After a few hours in the freezer, I transferred the tomatoes to a ziplock bag.

Frozen tomatoes in ziplock bag

Now I have a bag full of what looks like red billiard balls in my freezer! How will they taste? That remains to be seen. They will be mushy, for sure, and only good for soups, sauces, and the like. I will keep you posted!

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• Why eat local?

What is a localvore anyway? And less importantly, how do you spell it? According to Webster’s, a locavore is “a person who attempts to eat only foods grown locally.” Webster’s has no listing for localvore, although this spelling is certainly in use. Nationally, the locavore spelling seems to be more widespread, but in Vermont, localvore is more common, so I have chosen that version. 

Eating 100% local year-round in Vermont is probably not feasible, although there are some people who have come darn close. I see local eating as a continuum, looking something like this:

1. Growing it yourself
2. Buying directly from a farmer
3. Buying local products from a local store
4. Buying products made locally from non-local ingredients (example: locally baked bread)
5. Buying non-local products in a local independent market
6. Buying non-local products in a chain store

I’m sure I missed a step or two, but that’s the general idea.

And why strive to eat local? Reasons will vary from person to person. Some reasons might be:

• Support local businesses
• Keep your money in the community
• Keep land in agricultural use
• Fresher food, resulting in higher nutrient levels and better taste
• Less fuel used for transport, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint (it takes a lot of diesel to drive a refrigerated truck to Vermont from California!)
• Knowing your source: by meeting the farmer who grows your food, you can find out exactly how it was produced and be more confident in its quality

I’m hardly a localvore purist. Far from it: I’ve just been learning about the localvore movement over the past few months, and while I’ve been buying from farmer’s markets during the summer for many years, my family happily ate (organic) bananas and salad all last winter without thinking much about it. Lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and wondering how we can be more local eaters. I’m hoping this blog will help people learn about eating local, and help connect eaters with local farmers.

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