How to harvest peppers and tomatoes for later use in sauces without harming taste Is there anyway I can pick my peppers and tomatoes now and freeze them immediately for later use to make hot sauces and tomato sauces? I am trying to find the most efficient way to process my pepper and tomato harvest.
The pepper stems and seeds would be removed, the tomatoes would be halved and cores removed before freezing in vacuum bags. Once I have enough peppers and tomatoes, I would thaw them and make hot sauce and tomato sauce respectively. Furthermore, I want to smoke my peppers to make chipotles (for chipotle hot sauce), however it is not really efficient to smoke 2 pounds of peppers every couple of days. I would like to smoke all 20+ pounds of peppers all at once. Its just that 20+ pounds of peppers don't ripen all at once.
I have several pepper varieties I use to make hot sauce and I have a couple different paste tomato varieties to make tomato sauce. I do not have enough peppers and tomatoes to pick right now, but over the next 3-4 weeks I will have over 100 pounds of tomatoes and over 20 pounds of peppers to harvest.
I know the peppers and tomatoes will be soft when thawed, I am worried that the tomatoes may taste sour due to the freeze. I am not sure how the peppers will take the smoke flavor when soft. I was considering dehydrating the ripe peppers as I pick them over the next few weeks. But when I want to smoke them, the dehydrated peppers might not take the smoke flavor. If I had to rehydrate the peppers before smoking, the &quot;waterlogged&quot; peppers might not take the smoke flavor.
I understand the flavor will not be the same as making sauce with fresh produce. It just doesn't make sense to make small sauce batches every 3 days for the next 3-4 weeks.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or how I should tackle this feat in a different way that I may not have even considered. There has to be an easier way to accomplish this. If I must freeze the produce, I would greatly prefer to freeze them the same day I harvest versus picking everyday for a week then a big freeze on the weekend. Those peppers I picked on Monday might start to soften by the weekend.
All sauces will be canned and spend 30 minutes in a boiling water bath.
We've been freezing both vegetables for years, with no loss of flavor.
Tomatoes
Unless your tomatoes have very thin skins, I recommend that you skin them prior to freezing. If you don't remove the skins first, you may wind up with the leathery skins floating in your sauce, which isn't really appetizing. To easily skin a tomato, press the back of a sharp knife onto the tomato, press gently, then rub the fruit to loosen the peel. Next, just make a small cut and start peeling with the sharp side of the knife. We also remove all seeds at that time. Alternatively, use a food mill (not a food processor) to process the tomatoes.
We freeze the tomatoes in roughly one-quart amounts, which is what we generally use at any one time.
Peppers
As you noted, you'll cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds, but we've found with experience that the frozen peppers, when thawed, turn mushy; we get around this by using the peppers as soon as we remove them from the freezer. They even retain a little crunch!
We freeze our peppers by cutting them into edible-sized slices (after removing the seeds), laying them out on a cookie sheet, and then putting the entire sheet into the freezer for a couple/three hours. This helps the slices to freeze faster (which we assume helps keep them move flavorful, but that's an assumption only); it also keeps them from sticking together after we bag them. When the slices are frozen, we bag them. We then use only the number of slices we need for a dish, cutting them up immediately upon removal from the freezer bag and adding to the dish mostly frozen to avoid the yucky mushiness.
Given that thawed peppers are really not appetizing, I don't know if you'll like the end results after smoking them. They will definitely NOT hold any kind of crunch and may even somewhat disintegrate in your sauces. Well worth a try to do it, though, especially if you do only a small test batch first.