How To Store Tomatoes Properly. Part 3

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

There are many ways to preserve your tomato crop, and each of them is quite effective. The third part of the article will discuss the secrets of early ripening and successful storage of these tasty and healthy vegetables. It turns out that you can save tomatoes not only whole, but also in sliced form. And tomatoes that start to deteriorate are quite possible to reanimate. How to do this will be described below

Secrets of storing tomatoes

Small tomatoes are considered to be the most suitable for storage - they survive much better than their large relatives. And since they are very sensitive to any foreign odors, they must be stored separately from other vegetables and fruits.

Tomatoes that need ripening are best picked together with the stalks and hung in cold and well-ventilated places. For slow ripening, they are laid out in cool, light rooms, and if you want them to ripen faster, the fruits are transferred to well-lit places, where the air temperature reaches twenty-five degrees. In such conditions, tomatoes ripen from five to ten days. For uniform ripening, they need to be systematically turned over.

Most often, tomatoes are stored in clean, disinfected boxes equipped with lattice bottoms and walls. Just before putting the fruits in them, they are covered with clean paper. In addition, the tomatoes must be placed in the boxes correctly: each row is either shifted with paper, or the tomatoes are wrapped in it. You can also sprinkle the layers with peat or sawdust.

In places where tomatoes are stored, care should be taken to ensure good daily ventilation - this is necessary to weather the carbon dioxide emitted from the fruit. The condition of the tomatoes should also be checked weekly, immediately removing spoiled specimens from healthy ones.

Tomatoes, which were harvested at the stage of milk maturity, are recommended to be folded in trellised boxes, having previously wrapped them in black paper. And in this case, each layer of fruits is shifted with straw. Then the containers are removed in a well-ventilated dark place, the temperature in which is about ten degrees. In this form, tomatoes are often stored until January.

To preserve ripe and ready-to-eat tomatoes, they are folded into a spacious container and poured with a mixture of water, salt and vinegar in a ratio of 8: 1: 1. Or you can fill them with vegetable oil - in this case, a layer of oil should cover the tomatoes by 1 cm from above.

There is another way of storing tomatoes: strong red tomatoes are washed, the stalks are cut off and the fruits are sorted by size and degree of ripeness. Overripe fruits are cut into large pieces. Then in a saucepan or in a jar with an eight- or ten-centimeter layer, first spread the chopped tomatoes, after which they are slightly salted, and then a layer of whole fruits is laid and the top layer is again sprinkled with salt. These steps are repeated until the dishes are full.

If the tomatoes began to deteriorate

Quite often, summer residents are faced with the fact that the tomato crop harvested and sent for storage begins to rot. Most often this occurs as a result of infection of tomatoes with various diseases - late blight, bacterial cancer and some other ailments. In most cases, the manifestation of diseases is accompanied by the formation of unpleasant brownish specks on the fruits. In this situation, a simple pasteurization procedure will come to the rescue.

Tomatoes are dipped in hot water (its temperature should be between 55 and 65 degrees) and kept there for a couple of minutes. If you overexpose them, the fruits can soften, which is highly undesirable. Then the tomatoes taken out of the water are dried in a well-ventilated and dry place, spreading them out on paper.