When you have a lot of tomatoes to can, you need an efficient way to get all your jars processed. Let me tell you how!

Farmer Doc planted 25 tomato plants in our garden this year.

That’s right, twenty-five.

With so many tomato plants, you know that means we have had an over-abundance of tomatoes this year. In fact, they are still going strong… I have almost 50 pounds of tomatoes in my kitchen right now, and more are ready to pick!

I love having home-canned tomatoes to use all winter long. We can pasta sauce, pizza sauce, chili base, salsa, whole and diced tomatoes, and tomato juice. Farmer Doc loves the homemade juice – he drinks it every morning on his way to work!

Canning is hot work – all that water, all that boiling, all that squishing the tomatoes. And it takes a lot of time. Which means it is hard to do with Baby Doc underfoot, and when Farmer Doc works long days at the vet hospital and in the hay fields. We often don’t start our canning extravaganzas until after Baby Doc goes to bed and we’ve had a little bit of dinner… and that makes it almost 8:00pm before we even get started. So we needed to come up with a way to get all this canning done in a hurry. Read on for our solution!

How to Can a Lot In a Hurry

That’s right, we use turkey fryers! Thanksgiving is usually a pretty big event in our family, and we often will roast a turkey in the oven and fry two outside. But what can you do with these big turkey fryers the rest of the year? Can with them, of course!

These fryers are big enough that they can hold up to 8 pint jars or 7 quart jars in a single layer.

And they are deep enough that they can hold two layers of jars! (Did you do that math? That’s 16 pints or 14 quarts in each fryer. And we have two fryers!)

Bring the water to boiling. (If you have hard water like we do, you should add about a half cup of white vinegar to the water.) Add the first layer of jars to the fryer pot. Carefully add the second layer of jars. You want the jars to be covered by about one inch of water. You may need to add more water, or take some water out to keep it from boiling over. Then bring the water back to boiling, and let the jars boil as long as your recipe needs.

We set the fryers up on our back porch, right outside the sliding door. It’s easy to carry everything outside, and it’s easy to keep an eye on them while they are doing their hot water bath thing. So much salsa!

This technique can only be used for canning that can be done in a hot water bath. If you need to use a pressure canner, I’m very sorry, but you’re out of luck with this method. (Two years ago we canned about 50 quarts of green beans. Inside. On the stove. In a pressure canner. Seven quarts at a time. Ugh.) It is important to follow food safety – and canning safety – procedures when you are doing any kind of canning. Check out this series of posts on AgriCultured for more information.

We usually are still up until almost midnight waiting for the hot water bath to finish doing it’s job. But when the salsa has to sit in the water bath for 90 minutes, that’s plenty of time to get the kitchen cleaned up and still have a few minutes to sit down and relax before bed. (Maybe with a cocktail from The Farm Wife Drinks!)

What is your favorite thing to do with veggies out of your garden?

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