So processing tomatoes for canning can be a long, juicy process. And after all that washing and coring and scoring and blanching and peeling and slicing and dicing and dripping and sticking and flooding of tomato juice…. You are left with more juice than tomato. I have five kids. NOT an option. But how about 10-15 minutes on the front end and then the crock pot does most of the work for you, and you end up with jars of stewed tomatoes, not juice? Sounds doable? Here ya go.
Rinse, core, and halve your tomatoes. Feed the cores to your chickens or compost pile.
Fill the crock pot with tomato halves.
Put the lid on and cook on high without stirring until they cook down. I usually put them in in the evening and cook until morning, or start int he morning and they are done by evening. But having them done in the morning works better.
You will know it has cooked long enough when the tomatoes are sitting level in juice, more or less. If they aren’t pretty juicy it will be harder to remove the peel. If your crockpot cooks particularly hot and the sides will burn if you don’t stir it, then cook on low.
Unplug the crock pot and let it sit until the tomatoes cool enough to grasp the peel and pull without scalding yourself. Use a slotted spoon to lift them out of the juices. Grasp the wrinkled peels and they should slip right off, usually in tact. After you get all you can see, stir the tomatoes to find any you missed. If you see what looks like a red toothpick, it is a peel that came off and rolled up, so pick those out
Optional: If it has cooled enough, you can reach in with your clean hand and crush the cooked tomatoes by hand. If not, mash bigger pieces with your spoon and don’t worry about making them uniform or small. It won’t really matter later.
If all your tomatoes didn’t fit, you can repeat the wash, core, slice step and add more tomatoes until it is full again.
Cook until tomatoes are soft again and pick out the peels. Then turn crock pot to low and continue cooking UNCOVERED. You can prop the lid to the side or with a large wooden spoon. This allows the water in the tomato juice to evaporate and reduces the liquid to a thick tomato juice.
When the juice is at a level proportional with the amount of solid tomato, it is ready to can. There is a lot of leeway here. You can have a juicier batch of tomatoes or a very thick batch with hardly any liquid that pours off. The thicker is is the darker it will be.
Cover and turn on high again so they will be hot for canning. Get your water bath canner filled and heating and jars clean and ready. Just spoon into jars using a funnel, add 1 tsp salt per quart, and stir. No reason for me to reiterate how to do this when it is already all over the internet. Here is a great instructional link for the rest of the canning process. Skip steps 3-6.
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