What do you do with less than perfect tomatoes?

Maybe I'm being too frugal. I'm sharing a video I made with a recipe for paprika-turmeric flavored tomato sauce that I make with less than perfect (bug bites, cracks etc) tomatoes. Do you have any recipe to share to use non-table worthy tomatoes?

I call the sauce tomato saver sauce. Here it is video:

We grow a lot of tomatoes - very successful growing our paste ("Roma") type outside, and vine-type indeternimate globe tomato plants in our greenhouse. My wife does most of the canning of tomato pieces and sauce, but I've helped some years... I even think I did most of it one year. Anyhow, she does make sauces, Italian style and Mexican-hot, but we cans a lof of quartered tomatoes that we add to soups later.

You're not being too frugal, in my opinion. We always just cut out bad spots or sections, and remove all of the skins and the stem end. No problem if, instead of a one-quarter piece, you're sometimes adding a smaller piece du to cutting out bad portions.

This fairly closely describes the method we use for canning: http://pickyourown.org/canning_tomatoes.htm

You requested recipes, and I suppose you may have meant for sauces. But here is our tomato-based recipe that I use sometimes for making a "tortilla soup", and for which I use our home-canned tomatoes. Of course, you can multiply the ingredient amounts to make a larger batch, if you want.

1 quart (or litre) tomatoes in juice (either diced or blended)
3 quarts (litres) water (can include 1 quart soup stock on-hand)
3 medium-sized onions (or two large), sliced fairly thin, sautéed, and…
2 or 3 largish stalks of celery, diced & sautéed with the onions
2 medium-sized chicken breasts (or equivalent volume of light & dark chicken meat)
2 cups hominy or corn kernels
1/3 cup uncooked rice
2 rounded tsp chili pdr (if you use chopped chillies, increase the volume)
1 rounded tablespoon cumin pdr
2 level tsp curry pdr
2 tsp lime juice
¼ cup brewed coffee
2 large (or 3 medium) cloves of garlic, crushed
Salt to taste

Put quart of tomatoes with water (or water/soup-stock) in a soup pot, and add chicken, at medium-high heat if chicken is frozen; medium heat if it is thawed. Add diced onions and corn kernels. Add chili powder, cumin, lime juice, garlic, and curry powder. Avoid heavy boiling, and stew for a minimum of one hour. Remove chicken and cool it enough to handle; dice into smallish pieces; return these to the soup.

Add the rice, stir in. Cover, simmer soup for at least another 90 minutes. Top-up water level if it evaporates out very much. Taste and add more seasonings, if desired.

You can add torn tortilla pieces 10 minutes before serving, if desired.

Has to be chutney either red or green tomatos will do
David

In my world, there is no such thing as 'too frugal'!
I grow a lot of tomatoes for freezing/bottling, and if a tomato is about to go off due to...whatever...
I just cut out the 'whatever' and add the tomato to the bucket in the freezer.

Sad looking tomatoes get turned into oven-baked gems that I hoard. Slice in half or quarters depending on the size, put on a greased baking sheet, sprinkle heavily with salt, bake 2 hours at 350, until they collapse, start to dry around the edges, maybe caramelize a bit. I just froze five 1/2 pints of these for winter treats. So good.

I suppose that I'm blessed to have an overabundance of tomatoes. Not just a simple overabundance, but an overwhelming overabundance. I grew about 300 tomato plants this year. I don't mind at all sharing a tomato with a bug, or a raccoon, or a microorganism. I just cut out what I don't want and feed it to the garden. I bottle tomatoes until I run out of bottles. I sell as many as I can pick. I give them away to friends and to the food pantry. There are still many more tomatoes than I can deal with.

So I make spaghetti sauce, and ketchup, and tomato sauce, and salsa, and tomato juice. I eat them raw, and in salads, and I blend them up and add to soups, and I add them whole to roasts. And they keep producing, and producing, and producing...

Headed to the farmer's market:


Making Ketchup:


This is what my fields typically look like at the end of the season: Worm food!

I slice up the good part and put it in a skillet and fry it up sometimes with allium of some type (garlic/scrapes/green onion etc) and add it to my egg with flatbread breakfast
My flatbread is often sourdough that didnt rise too well maybe with a pinch of cream of tartar and baking soda

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
This is what my fields typically look like at the end of the season: Worm food!

My field looked like that year. I was planning on rotating but ended up burying them over and got piles of volunteers which I mostly moved.

I have roses growing in there from cuttings.

No tomatoes this year-well none of the ones we planted!
Lots of cherry tomato volunteers.
My favorite thing to do is slow roast them with butter and onions.
I often use an electric skillet set on low.
The resulting sauce can be dark brown with nearly burnt goodness.
This year, peppers have joined the pan.
By themselves, the skins can be bitter from low, slow butter roasting,but the sweetness of the tomatoes carries the day.

One year my cherry tomatoes were just getting ripe when an early hard frost was promised.
I went out, sliced a spade straight down into a 5 gallon bucket size plug of roots.

Scooped the shovel under the plug and put it into the bucket.
Watered well.. and put it in my unheated southern exposure sunroom.
A dab with a q-tip  or paintbrush from flower to flower to pollinate...
I had Fresh Tomatoes into the next March.

Another trick is to pick all the green ones before the frost. I put them on newspaper in cardboard beer flats.
Easy enough to stack them crossways 4 or 5 high.
Every Wed before fundraising coffee, I would go through and pick out the ripe ones.
Take them along to gift away to the seniors.
Good til late January.

Excess go into sandwich ziplocks and stack in the corner of the freezer.
No need to wash them, take them out frozen, run them under warm water and it slips the skin off. Pop the frozen tomato into the pot.

I always seemed to run out of time in fall.
Pull them out in winter and steam up the house with marvelous slow cooked crockpot Tomato paste.

Ann Torrence wrote:Sad looking tomatoes get turned into oven-baked gems that I hoard. Slice in half or quarters depending on the size, put on a greased baking sheet, sprinkle heavily with salt, bake 2 hours at 350, until they collapse, start to dry around the edges, maybe caramelize a bit. I just froze five 1/2 pints of these for winter treats. So good.

I wonder if they would need freezing if they were dried like this?