I live at a higher altitude and my sauce/juice tomatoes ripen slowly - I end up harvesting in small batches and not having enough all at once to go into canning. So, as mentioned earlier in this forum, I wash them and cut an "X" in the bottom end of the tomatoes and freeze them as I harvest. I end up canning in January when I'm not so busy with all the other garden and preserving jobs. When I am ready to process the tomatoes, I fill a clean kitchen sink with warm water and dump all the frozen tomatoes into the sink. As I remove the tomatoes from the sink, the skins just fall off. I reserve the skins and cook them down separately into a paste which I stir back into the sauce as a very last step. I simmer the tomatoes until most of the water is cooked off and the sauce is somewhat homogenous. I then use a food mill to remove the seeds which is much easier to do without the skins. I hot water bath the sauce. The sauce doesn't separate in the jar and it's smooth enough to be juice or sauce or soup, so I do not add anything to the sauce (except the requisite salt and bottled lemon juice), and herbs and spices are added as the canned sauce is used.
