One of my favorite things about being a small, independent business is that I get to try new things, experiment, and learn a lot in the process. This year, I’m rolling up my sleeves and trying my hand at preserving tomatoes! Customers have been asking for tomatoes for a while now, and I’m excited to have found the right partner for the job.

Frog Hollow Farm

Or maybe I should say the right partner found us! Last year, Amy Dietrich of Frog Hollow Farm in Walla Walla, WA asked if we’d be interested in canning the tomatoes they grow at their small family farm. I thought it sounded interesting, and the next thing I knew she showed up in a pickup truck carrying 500 pounds of tomatoes for us to try out!

After tasting the tomatoes, everyone here at the cannery was blown away by the amazing flavor and quality—and we thought they’d be the perfect compliment to what we do here at Muirhead. So that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship—and this year Frog Hollow planted an acre of tomatoes reserved just for us to preserve in our summer canning season.

The right balance

Canning tomatoes is a little different than canning other fruits (and, yes, tomatoes are technically a fruit—just keep them out of the fruit salad). They’re classified as an acidified food, meaning you have to add acid to them in order to keep them safe when canning (for all you pH geeks, we’ve specifically got to keep the pH balance in the container below 4.2). The other fruits we preserve are naturally acidic and so don’t require any special attention in this area, so we’ll be using lemon juice to keep the pH balance at the right level for tomatoes.

The right recipe

To take the tomatoes from the vine to the jar to your table with perfectly preserved flavor, we’ve been experimenting with the ideal recipe. We’ll be producing both diced tomatoes and a tomato sauce called a passata, packaged in glass jars.

My wife, Jenny, suggested we add a hint of salt to the diced tomatoes to bring out the flavor. And she was, as usual, exactly right—they’re like a burst of late-summer goodness captured in a jar. The passata is a tomato puree—a little bit thicker than a sauce, but not as thick as a paste—and I think my Italian grandmother would be proud of the recipe I’ve pulled together here.

To make the diced tomatoes and the passata extra special, we’re placing (by hand!) a whole basil leaf inside every jar. It adds just a touch of subtle flavor, but not overwhelming, so the tomatoes are still perfect for any recipe you might want to use them in. And did you know that while basil and tomatoes are a natural pair on the plate, they’re also good to pair up in the garden? Basil actually repels a lot of the insects that damage tomatoes, so they balance each other out in more than one way.

New adventures

Trying new things and learning along the way is what makes every day interesting around here. And it lets us create really special products with a personal touch. Just like every time we’ve added a new product, half the fun is going to be learning how it’s done!

What’s unique about tomatoes is that, unlike the other fruits we preserve, they’re harvested every week, so we’ll have a lot of chances to tweak, tinker, and perfect our process all the way through October. I think we’re going to learn a lot this year—and eat a whole lot of excellent tomatoes from Amy’s farm too.

Get set for tomato time!

Seems like a lot of people are just as excited as we are, because the pre-orders are already rolling in. The cannery is all set up with the equipment we need to strain and puree (and to be honest, I’m pretty excited about tinkering with the machinery too). We can’t wait to start preserving these delicious local tomatoes and get them delivered to our customers this fall.