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I grew mortgage lifter, pink fang and cherry tomatoes... first garden in 35 years. Ended up with bad septoria which led to bite, been tough keeping these 12 foot plants going in cheap cages. 20% have blossom end rot. A few have a little white mold and a couple smell a little off. Wind blew down the plants 2 weeks ago, so lots of green tomatoes fell. About half are ripe now.

So I have a counter top full of different tomatoes of different ripeness, about half are green from the hurricane and 40% are ripe or over ripened, 15% have some kinda end rot.

I was planning to make sauce... is it worth it, should I just cut off what looks bad and mix it all together in one sauce or should I say screw it and go buy romas? More cherry tomatoes need to be picked, just a few I started with. Is it okay to throw in the ones not fully ripe?

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Mark Morgan Lloyd
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gunslingor
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  • Do you include the tomato seeds in your sauce recipe? – Kingsley Jul 31 '23 at 03:27
  • I bought the Westinghouse tomatoe mill. It seemed to remove most of the seeds, but then I ran the skins thru a second time and there were tons of seeds on the second go. Maybe the screen is too large. Might return for a better one. Amazon sucks. – gunslingor Jul 31 '23 at 13:24

2 Answers2

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I’ve been volunteering at a farm this season, and have done something similar with the stuff that can’t be saved for distribution, typically because it’s either split, or has a bad spot on it.

There are two main problems that I’ve run into:

  1. Some of the tomato varieties are just too sweet. I solved this by adding some sort of hot pepper in to balance it out.
  2. Non-plum tomatoes can be very wet. This either requires cooking down the sauce for a very long time, or finding some other way to thicken it. My solution has been to cook it down for a while, then add a pound of some sort of really chunky pasta to it. I then use a spider to extract the pasta while leaving most of the sauce behind.
Joe
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So, some specific answers to your situation:

  • You can make sauce with the tomatoes with end rot, if you cut out the affected portions. However, this will make it challenging to peel the tomatoes; if this is your plan, look seriously into getting a tomato mill.
  • Mortgage lifter tomatoes will make a fine sauce, as will most cherries (but, again, tomato mill to peel them). The pink fangs are intended for sauce.
  • Do not use the underripe tomatoes; those will result in a vegetal, acidic-tasting sauce with chunks of green tomato in it. Instead, save those green tomatoes and ripen them indoors, for table tomato purposes.
FuzzyChef
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    Or make something like green tomato chutney, if you've got a glut – Chris H Jul 30 '23 at 17:12
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    Made some sauce with everything. It's crazy all those red tomatoes made 1 jar plus 1 big plate. It was superb, maybe better than anything I had in italy and france. A little sweat, but so fresh. Might try to grow 24 roma plants before season ends, it might not freeze till January in georgia. I think I get the sauce thing. – gunslingor Jul 30 '23 at 22:43