It’s been a good year for tomatoes in the Pacific Northwest. The harvest season started a little bit late, but the warm fall weather has helped ripen most of the fruit on our vines. If you plant more than one or two tomato plants in your garden, it’s almost impossible to eat everything fresh before it spoils. In September, we spend just as much time in the kitchen processing crops as we do outside in the garden. There are many ways to process and store tomatoes, but freezing has become our preferred technique. We still pull out the canning supplies each fall for jams and pickles, but find ourselves putting up fewer tomatoes in jars, and freezing more of them in cubes. Freezing can save you time during the busy harvest season and make it easier to divy up your bounty when it’s time to cook. 

Freezing is a fast and easy way to store perishable produce with nutrients and flavor intact. We recommend blending up your tomatoes before freezing because the thawed tomatoes will end up mushy anyway. To save room in the freezer, you can cook blended fruit down until the liquid is reduced by about ⅓-½ before freezing, but this step isn’t necessary. You can also get fancy and cook your tomatoes into your favorite sauce, adding the herbs and spices at freezing time so it’s all ready to kick start your favorite recipe later this winter. You can be your very own Blue Apron. 

Ice cube trays are a great tool for freezing usable amounts of tomatoes. We use a combination of ½ cup and ¼ cup silicone trays to freeze our blended fruit. Once the cubes are set, we remove them from the tray, pack them into plastic bags, and throw them back in the freezer. These manageable sized cubes make it easy to grab just what you need for a single recipe, no thawed leftovers sitting in the fridge taunting you each day until they grow mold.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes!