This year at Oasis we planted four 75 foot rows of a variety of tomatoes. Berkeley Tie Dye an heirloom, Oregon Spring an open-pollinated Bush variety, a paste tomato and Coeur de Bouaf, a French variety often called ox heart. Most of them are staked and trellised and I'm loving my new system which has the tomatoes well under control.
My new kitchen full of stainless steel sinks counters and a big 8 burner stove is able to handle three or four big pots all at once. One of them is 38 quarts and it's full of tomato right now.
The first pot of Berkeley tie dye is 38 quarts full to the very top and then stomped down once or twice to make them fit. I used to make this first cook short so that I could strain them out and get more in the pot but now with the bigger pots it makes more sense to cook them longer with skins on. This should make the sauce richer and more flavorful as well as imbue it with more of the beneficial from the skins. Each of the varieties was quite different in cook time the longest being over three hours. My method on sauce I call the slump test -- just take a couple of ounces and put it on a plate and see if the center pile holds up a bit and the edges don't just run watery.
Straining is always the hard part because strainers that are available to me are all small kitchen varieties and we're too small and operation to get anything commercial. I'm leaning towards inventing some sort of Amish apparatus. All total in this batch I processed about 168 pound representing about 21 gallons of crush and netted 23 quarts of sauce (a ratio of 3.7 to 1). About 6 hours turn around but worth it as the sauce is exceptionally tasty.
