Preserve Your Extra Tomatoes With This Super Simple Hack

With the gardening season closing out, many of us are harvesting the last of our freshly-grown tomatoes. If you’re like me and you’ve got a bunch of juicy reds you’re trying to give away to neighbors who also have too many of their own, you may be interested in learning how to preserve tomatoes so you can use them later.

As you probably already know, you could preserve your extra tomatoes by canning or jarring them, or making them into tomato sauce. The thing is, homemade tomato sauce only lasts a few days in the fridge, and canning or jarring them requires some time and labor. Luckily, if you’re not in the mood to slave away making sauce just yet and you’d prefer to save your precious fruit for recipes way down the line, there’s actually a much faster and easier way to preserve tomatoes — freezing them.

That’s right — you can, in fact, preserve tomatoes by freezing them. The best part is, you barely need to exert any effort to do so. There’s no need to heat up the stove, break out the blender, or do anything else to prepare your tomatoes for freezing. All you have to do is pluck your ripe tomatoes off of the plant, give them a wash, grab a freezer bag or airtight container, stick them inside, and freeze!

Of course, the way you decide to preserve your tomatoes should depend on what you plan to use them for. Frozen tomatoes don’t thaw to their original consistency, so you can’t exactly slice them up and put them on a sandwich. However, thawed tomatoes are perfect for dicing and throwing into recipes like soups, stews, curries, and sauces.

You can keep tomatoes in the freezer for up to six months. To thaw your frozen tomatoes, simple leave them out on the counter in a bowl or use the microwave if you need them right away. The skins should peel off easily once thawed, too!

Super simple hacks like this help us to not waste the best of what nature has to offer. We hope you’ll use it and enjoy some amazing dishes as a result!