Gardening Season 2023 - Making more tomato juice

Yesterday afternoon we prepared empty bottles just by rinsing them and turning them upside down so they are ready to be used. These are mostly 0,75 or 1 liter wine bottles but there's also a few random smaller ones.

Harvested tomatoes are being washed and ready for the next step... It turned out there's more tomatoes than expected which is amazing! First round we had a small batch so I thought there won't be much left but I was wrong! We might do another, final round and that one will definitely be the least amount of juice but it's better to use what we have in order to avoid buying tomato juice as much as possible - this goes out to everything we grow and can preserve/store/freeze/make something out of it.

Cutting up tomatoes in similar size pieces so it's easier to process. We also left some seeds to dry and store for planting next season, this is something we do each year with tomatoes and sometimes we have additional seeds that we buy, get from our neighbors etc.

Next step is processing the cut up tomatoes through this machine that extracts the juice so it's ready for cooking. Our machine is quite small so this takes a while to do...

Once all the juice is extracted, it's time for cooking. We always do this outside using this kind of stove and wood fire. Once the tomato juice starts to boil, it's left on fire for another two hours (for this amount of juice) and 10-15 towards the end some salt, sugar and preservative. We add as little preservative as possible just to keep the juice from going bad over the months to come. Once the cooking is done, tomato juice can be poured in the glass bottles and we cover it with a blanket until it's completely cooled down. Then it's stored on the basement shelfs and ready to use!