found an post from 2011 and it answered most of my questions. I will plant more paste type to use for sauce and maybe some heirlooms for flavor

oldokie,

My favorite canner changes from year to year, and I am not sure there is any one best one. There are many terrificly good ones.

My current favorites include Speckled Roman, Heidi,San Marzano Redorta and Schiavone Italian Paste. Heidi came to this country from Africa and is the most heat tolerant and prolific paste type I've ever grown, which is important in my mostly hot and dry location. Also, you'll never go wrong if you use Rutgers, which is pretty good for fresh eating as well as canning.

Last year I grew Carol Chyko's Big Paste and Carol Chyko's Big Paste Black and they were tasty and produced impressive yields.

If you want a standard hybrid paste tomato that is similar to Roma but with better flavor and disease tolerance, Viva Italia is my favorite one in that class.

When I am canning tomatoes to use in sauce or canning tomato juice, or when I am making a pot of home-made pasta sauce, I have found that a blend of all the tomatoes I grow gives the best-flavored juice or sauce because the flavor is deeper and richer since it is a blend of many tomato flavors. If I am making salsa, I can use any old paste tomato and it hardly matters which tomatoes I use because the flavor of the peppers, garlic, onions,cilantro, etc. override the tomato flavor.

If you want to can a lot of tomato juice, you'll get more juice from regular beefsteak or slicing tomatoes than from paste tomatoes. Paste tomatoes, by their very nature, are lower in juice (some are very low) and have dense flesh, so that you can cook them down into sauce more quickly. That is sort of the opposite of what you want for tomato juice.

The best tomato juice I've ever made had a lot of pink, purple and black tomatoes blended together, including Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Stump of the World, Estler's Mortgage Lifter, Valena Pink, Mortgage Lifter, Arkansas Traveler, German Giant, German Queen, Prudens Purple and Black From Tula.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Thanks for asking, oldokie. I was wanting to know.

Thanks again, Dawn

You're welcome!