Tomato water?

This year I am making tomato sauce from our garden via the 'freezer method'.  It's very simple indeed.  As you pick tomatoes and they ripen, core them and cut into chunks. Put the chunks in a freezer bag and pop it into the freezer.  As more tomatoes ripen, drag the bag out and add the new tomatoes before freezing again. If the bag is full, start a new one. When there are enough frozen tomatoes, make sauce!

We leave skins on since we are blending our sauce before canning.  Lot's of flavor is lost when skins are removed.  The same with seeds, which don't bother us at all.  If one does not like skins nor seeds, a peeling step can be added in.

The freezing process ruptures the tomatoes cell walls, releasing the water that must otherwise by cooked off.

This is a great method for the home gardener who has a steady supply of ripe tomatoes but not enough on any given pick to make sauce that day.  Before this year I always bought in our Roma sauce tomatoes by the half-bushel, but this year I decided it's all coming from our own garden.

Last night I pulled four gallon freezer bags of mixed tomatoes and put them in the sink to thaw. That was enough for one good pot of sauce.

This morning I strained the tomatoes, separating the accumulated water from the tomato meat.   AKA.... 'Tomato Water'.  Before I tossed this sorta golden looking stuff, I looked it up to see if it had a use.  Well!  Who would have guessed?  'Prized by chefs as Liquid Umami, and used in dressings, sauces, soups, bread, and even as a cocktail mixer'.  So I tasted the stuff.  Oh My Indeed.  Rich, salty without salt, and deeply flavored. Like sipping summer from a spoon.  The salty or savory taste in tomato water comes from free glutamate, an amino acid that triggers umami receptors, which the brain often interprets as saltiness.  To think I had been ready to throw this out!

So, as I hot water bath canned five quarts of our own plain tomato sauce, I added three pints of tomato water to the bounty*.  Just like the sauce, the tomato water got a pinch of citric acid before canning.  That brings the acidity into safe levels for water bath type canning methods.

I suspect this will take some of our meals and kick them up a notch or two.

*  The USDA states it is not safe to can Tomato Water.  The only reason they give is that they have not supplied us peons with a recipe for that, so OBVIOUSLY it is FORBIDDEN.  Do as your will, and your mileage may vary.