Small Batch Retort Canning

Over the summer our little garden only produces a few tomatos, beets, carrots, and so on a day.  After we eat what we want for that day. There is never really enough left at one time to can an entire batch of sauce but far to much to consume right then. 

We use our vacuum packer to vacuum pack and freeze these small batches daily.  Then at the end of the summer when the garden is done we remove the frozen tomatos, cook them down, cool in the fridge, then retort vacuum seal and can them. 

We never waste from the garden this way and make easy work for canning retorts for a full caner batch. And have food storage for the winter months from our own garden or collected from the local Farmers Market. 

Here is some pictures of our Tomatillos this past summer.

After we thaw these frozen tomatillo tomatos we will cook them down, add seasoning and cool the batch completely.  After the sauce has cooled we were able to put 16oz of the sauce in an 8oz pouch *remember retorts hold more liquids than solids*

They were then vacuum sealed in our Sammic 204T  then canned it at 10lbs of pressure for 45 minutes.  We want to make sure we start everything off cold so the entire mass comes up to heat at the same time.  We added 20 minutes to this process to make sure all bags were evenly cooked. 

This is the finished bags after they cooled to zero pressure for 30 plus minutes.  When we opened the caner the bags were still very hot but not so hot that they pushed out of the caner.  We put the hot bags in a sink of ice water. This process instantly shrinks up the retort bags and lets us see leaking bags easier.

We now have 16oz bags of Tomatillo tomatos to use in recipes until next year.