When I make sauce or tomato juice, I cook the tomatoes first until well softened. It makes putting them through the mill much easier. You certainly may use the frozen tomatoes. Make sure you wash them well before you freeze them and don't peel them.

I just made tomato sauce the way you are doing it and using the advice from a number of threads this is what I learned:

1. Core your tomatoes before freezing. It is a lot easier than trying to do it when they are frozen or thawing.

2. The skins come right off really easy as they thaw.

3. It makes a difference how your recipe measures the tomatoes. If it is by the pound then weigh them before working with them.

4. If you let them thaw it will save you a lot of time and energy when cooking down your sauce because as they thaw they will let off a lot of water.

5. It helps if you freeze the roma/paste type separate from the regular tomatoes if your recipe calls for both. You can see at a glance just how many of each you have.

6. Be sure you are using an approved and safe (tested) recipe.

Hope this helps and good luck with your canning. I am new at this too and this is the best place to learn.

I tried to link you to: Your Greatest Hit Recipes for Leesa and couldn't. Check out that thread reading lady walked me through how to make her sauce using frozen tomatoes. There are some great recipes there.

Oh, I'm not canning. I had planned to freeze the tomatoes until I get enough, then run them through the tomato mill, make sauce, and then freeze it. I'm afraid if I just leave the tomatoes at room temperature, they'll get overripe if I wait until I have enough to start making sauce with. And from what I understand, you don't refrigerate tomatoes. This is my first time, and I'm trying to figure out the best way of doing this.

I have a slow cooker, and I'd like to cook down the sauce that way. Seems like it would be less hassle overall.

Fine, you can freeze the sauce rather than canning but the preparation for freezing the tomatoes is the same as detailed above - core and freeze. Just follow the directions outlined by never-give-up.

Cooking down sauce in a crock pot doesn't work as you must leave the lid off and it still doesn't get hot enough and takes forever - thus the suggestions to drain off some of the water after they thaw BEFORE processing. You'll find several discussions about that here.

Dave

PS: a search here for how to freeze tomatoes will pull up many discussions on how-to

I think that some of it would still apply. Wash well, core them, freeze, when you thaw them pop the skins off. (my mill is a hand crank and it is a lot easier to mill them without the skins, I don't know what you have for a mill maybe it won't matter to you.) If you let them thaw in a colander and squeeze them a little you will get rid of a lot of water, so your sauce will cook down a lot faster. Just be gentle about it or you will have tomato squirt up the front of you or elsewhere. Been there done that. Ha! Ha! Do that before putting them in the mill and the pulp will be a lot less watery.

I don't know about using the slow cooker to cook it down, I have never done that.

Um, how do you core them? I know how you core an apple, but I've never cored a tomato. These are paste tomatoes, btw. Some are quite small, and some are long and cylindrical, so they're not regular tomato shape.

On the top of the tomato (where it attaches to the stem) just puncture it with a paring knive in a circular motion to just remove the circular brownish spot where it was attached. There isn't much of a core on a paste tomato. Does that make sense?

Forgot, also remove any bad spots before freezing too.

Plum tomatoes are very good for making sauce. It would be difficult to cook sauce down using a slow cooker unless you keep the cover off. You must have evaporation and that is a super slow process using the slow cooker.

Never-give-up: Oh, okay. Gotcha. Thanks.

Too bad the slow cooker idea wouldn't work. That would have made it easier.

I remember once trying to open a can of store-bought tomato paste. I put the can opener in, and as soon as I got an opening, the dang can squirted tomato sauce all over the walls and ceiling.

I decided not to use the can of exploding tomato sauce.

So basically it's wash, core, freeze...thaw, skin, mill, cook down, freeze again.

(And eventually, EAT!)

Thanks, everybody.

lilacs, you've got it! Good luck.

I don't bother to core tomatoes, btw, if they're going to go through the food mill. Anything hard gets left behind with the skins & seeds. (I don't usually bother to peel them, either, though, I might have to clean out my food mill screen a once or twice for a big batch. If they're froze, though, it's super-easy to slip off the skins first so you might want to go ahead and do that.)

Have fun!

Zabby

The tomatoes have been taken care of and are now sitting in the freezer.