You can happily freeze all things tomatoes. If you want to freeze whole tomatoes don't bother peeling them, the skins just rub off after they have been frozen. These tomatoes are great for recipes where you would have cooked them, they will not sub for fresh.

Almost every time we make tomato sauce we have leftovers and we just freeze them. No acidity issues that way.

-Robin

Here is a link to the current approved freezing rules. Some require pre-cooking, some just blanching, some just peeling.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP - Freezing Tomatoes

Usually its a better consistancy if you can blanch off the skins first.

Thank you Robin and ksrogers for the information and thank you for the link Dave. It answers questions I had about freezing other vegetables as well. Can't wait!

The other nice thing about taking the skins off before freezing is that you can just drop the frozen zip bag contents directly into the hot redsauce pot with the canned tomatoes, sauce, paste, seasonings, etc..

Good point grandad thanks.

I have a first year garden out front of the house with lots of tomato plants that I hope will give us lots of tomatoes to work with. I wanted to can some of them too, but need to come up with a gas cooktop of some sort. For safeties sake we only have a ceramic cooktop inside. We don't have a burner on our grill either. We do have a 2 burner coleman camping stove, but I don't know if it puts out enough BTUs to can with yet.

I would expect that if the Coleman is a propane burner, it should be able to boil water in a canner. You can easily test it, by filling the canner 3/4 fill, and heat it on the Coleman. Only issue may be that a windy day could cool and blow out the flame. When I can in the summertime, I do have an AC unit in my kitchen window, as well as a fan with vented hood over my stove that pulls out some heat. Yes, it still gets hot, but the AC helps to bring down the heat some. Another option is to start the canning in the evening after sunset, when its a little cooler. Obvioulsy if you get up early in the morning, it may be difficult, so weekend evenings might work for you.

Yes, the Coleman is a propane burner. I'll give that test a try.

Thanks for mentioning the heat in the kitchen bit, as for health reasons that would be a real problem for me. I had forgotten how hot it got when we were kids and my mother canned. Something outside in the sheltered shade would work better for me I think. We don't have AC either.