Canning Frozen Tomatoes

I love home canned tomatoes for spaghetti sauce, but that's hard to do here. I used to be able to buy a bushel of tomatoes cheap and then can away. Can't do that here. But if I grow them myself, I get one at a time...not conducive to canning. And I don't want to do one jar at a time! So we had to get creative. Did you know you can freeze tomatoes? So we froze tomatoes as we had extras. Then we canned them all at once. This talks about starting with cold jars, in cold water, but what we did was skin them, then heat the tomatoes before packing them into sterilized jars to can. The issue is that you can't put cold jars into boiling water (that's how you get breakage) so that's the biggest thing to deal with. But I'm also NOT starting with cold water EVERY batch!

What we did (we've done this two years running now) was freeze all summer (we just take the core out, freeze whole in gallon bags). Then once all the tomatoes are done, we pull them all out of the freezer and put in the fridge overnight.

Then we skin (run them under hot water for like 2 minutes before you start skinning) the next day and dice. Once we have them to this point, we do heat them for awhile on the stove (to try to stop breakage...we want a hot pack) and then canned normally. Worked great for us! We did have one breakage the first year, but none this year!