At last we have had some warmer weather to help the tomatoes to ripen. This is the first weekend I have had enough to bottle some tomato puree ready for the winter…so 12 bottles done, another few dozen to go. I like to bottle at least 50 small bottles to tide me over until the next tomato season. No tinned tomatoes for me! I use them in any recipe that requires tinned tomatoes from pizza to paella. If I still have tomatoes to harvest after I have achieved my target number of bottles, I like to boil down puree to make a paste , semi dry them or make sauce and chutney
I heard on Saturday's gardening talkback radio that it is the cooler ripening conditions which make Tassie tomatoes taste so much better. Tomatoes ripen best at 24.5°C – how on earth did they work that out???- so if you are ripening them in a warmer climate, they lose a lot of their flavour. I have always thought that my tomatoes were pretty tasty, now I have the reason why. I am sure all that calf shed bedding mulch that I use in the vege garden helps add to the flavour as well!
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