Tomato sauce showdown: Victorio strainer vs. immersion blender

When I've canned tomato sauce in the past, I've always gone through the arduous slog of coring and skinning all the tomatoes before cooking them down. This, as you might notice from my tone, is a huge pain in the ass. It takes forever and makes a mess -- and then I end up cooking the tomatoes down into slurry anyway. It's not like I need whole, intact skinned tomatoes! So this time I decided it was time to try a couple different methods.

1. The Victorio strainer.
2. The immersion blender.

The Victorio strainer is essentially a giant food mill. You feed tomatoes into the top while turning a handle. The strainer smashes the tomatoes and separates the skin and seeds from the usable tomato flesh. Then you cook down the tomato to the sauce consistency of your choosing and preserve it as you see fit. I did a basic water-bath canned tomato sauce, but you can always go for the pressure canner or freezer as you see fit. Be careful with food preservation! The USDA guide to home canning is a good resource here.

Anyway. I've had my mom's old strainer in the office closet for a few years, but I hadn't actually broken it out and used it before now. So this was a learning experience.

I got to learn how to put everything together. I got to learn that the clamp that holds the strainer upright was too wide for our dining table but too narrow for our kitchen counters. Eventually I found that it would fit the coffee table, which we then had to move into the kitchen to avoid getting tomato splashes all over the couch.

When we were ready to puree, I fed in the tomatoes and John worked the handle. Then we got to learn that trying to use a strainer set up on a knee-high table is a terrible idea if you have more than a small batch of tomatoes to process. There's nothing like hunching over for a full hour as you shovel chopped tomatoes.

We also got to learn that if you pad out the clamp with a towel, so as not to completely kill your table, the strainer is likely to come off square and start getting loose. We learned that some tomatoes were going to explode and rain juice all over the kitchen, no matter what we did. It was super exciting.

And afterward we got to learn how delightful it was to try to take apart and clean a strainer we'd had to wedge closed as tightly as possible -- while it was covered with all kinds of slippery tomato detritus.

On the other hand, the strainer certainly did make very short work of producing approximately 7.5 quarts of tomato puree -- less than half the time it would have taken to core and skin all the tomatoes. It required only the most minimal of prep work -- we only needed to remove the stems and quarter the larger tomatoes before pureeing.

We could use our grape tomatoes as well as the standard large tomatoes. We could feed the skins and seeds back through the strainer to squeeze out every last bit of tomato flesh. I got to rescue all the waste to make a huge batch of tomato broth, which turned out to be lovely and flavorful and full-bodied due to the pectin in the skins.

Overall, it was a reasonable trade.

The next weekend, I was not really up to mopping the kitchen again. Besides, I was thinking about that tomato broth and the pectin in the tomato skins. And then I remembered that Erica at Northwest Edible Life had written a post on actually making sauce from tomato skins instead of throwing them away. Erica was using the skins from her whole home-canned tomatoes; I was planning to sauce all of mine. Why even bother skinning the tomatoes in the first place, then? Why not just puree everything together at once?

So that's what I did. I washed my batch of tomatoes, chopped them roughly, removed any really seriously woody core pieces, and went at the remaining tomatoes with the immersion blender. Then I cooked the resulting slurry into delicious tomato sauce, ladled it into jars with the requisite lemon juice, and canned it all.

It worked very well indeed.

Since I already know how to puree things with the immersion blender, there wasn't very much to learn here per se. I just made sure to keep the head of the blender submerged, so I didn't accidentally splort random tomato bits all over the kitchen.

I also had to work in batches, so as not to overheat the blender. This is for sure the only time I've ever had to even think about that consideration when using our very nice and heavy-duty immersion blender! If I'd cooked the sauce down for a while and then pureed it, I think the overheating issue would have been less of a problem. But even so, the results were excellent.

This sauce cooked down a whole lot faster than the previous skinless batch. That is a real benefit when it's a minimum of 85F in your kitchen and you want to get past the heat portion of the day as swiftly as possible. You have to love fiber and pectin at work.

Even though this method defaulted to include skin and seeds, I was really happy with the finished sauce.

Tomato sauce showdown results

Victorio strainer:
- no seeds or skins in the sauce
- minimal prep required
- fast pureeing time
- long cooking time: 4-5 hrs
- technically fiddly, with lots of required setup
- equipment will not overheat
- can use grape and cherry tomatoes along with standard
- medium to high cleanup
- bulky equipment
- single-use, at least for the time being (maybe I will make applesauce sometime?)
- peels and seeds provide ingredients for convenient side-effect broth

Immersion blender:
- tiny seed and skin bits in the sauce
- slightly more than minimal prep required, but still not very much
- fast pureeing time
- faster (but still fairly long) cooking time: 2+ hrs
- not fiddly; no setup
- equipment can overheat; breaks are required
- can use grape and cherry tomatoes along with standard
- low cleanup
- more compact equipment
- definitely multi-use
- no secondary products produced

As long as no one cares about teeny tiny seed and skin bits -- and so far, I don't -- the winner is the immersion blender. Of course, if you cared very much about such a thing, it would be possible to strain your sauce after cooking it -- but I am just not going to go to that kind of effort unless I see a real need.

The other real issue is overheating your equipment. No one wants to blow out a blender just to get tomatoes processed into sauce. So if you're making a really huge batch, or don't have the time to take breaks between pureeing batches of tomatoes, the manual strainer is probably the best bet.

The end product is great either way, so choose what works for you.

How do you process your tomatoes before canning? What favorite tools do you use?

Perfect picnic egg salad

We're always talking about food at our house. What's your favorite sandwich? What are your top 5 beers? If you could open a diner, what would it be called, and what would the menu look like? And, of course, what is your perfect picnic menu?

Perfect picnic fare has a few qualifications. It tastes great cold. It's classic and uncomplicated. It's easy to transport. It can ideally be eaten with your hands, although we make limited exceptions for salads. And it's appropriate to the height of picnic season.

With all that in mind, we think the ideal picnic sandwich crown belongs to egg salad. It's tangy yet creamy, full of finely chopped crispy vegetables and big chunks of rich egg, seasoned liberally with fresh herbs, and stuffed between slices of toasted rye or sourdough: yes.

A good egg salad requires good hard-boiled eggs, so let's start there.

There are lots of different ways to boil eggs. The most common method involves boiling eggs for ten full minutes. This usually results in a hard-boiled egg with a rubbery yolk and a ring of greenish oxidation around the yolk: not good. To make a perfect hard-boiled egg, you need to cook your eggs for less than ten minutes. Eight minutes will produce an egg that looks like this one: solid, creamy-textured white with a yolk that's fully cooked on the outside, but still a bit damp in the middle. In an egg salad, the white will be more tender and delicious, while the yolk will mix more smoothly with the classic mayo & mustard dressing. It's an ideal situation.

Perfect hard-boiled eggs

Put your eggs, cold from the refrigerator, in a pot. Cover with cold water. Put the pot on the stove and bring it to a boil. When the water starts to boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and start timing.

Take your pot off the heat at the eight minute mark for large eggs. If you're using extra large, you can push it to nine minutes. Immediately drain off the hot water and run your eggs under the cold tap. I like to cool down the whole pan under the faucet, turning to get all the metal in contact with the cold water. Then, either in your cooled pot or a separate bowl, cover your eggs in cold water and add a handful of ice cubes.

Let your eggs chill until they're cool enough to peel. Then whack them all over with the back of a spoon and peel them, starting with the wider end. I like to peel eggs under a thin stream of cold water; this way, the water gets behind the membrane and helps loosen it a bit.

Voila: a perfect hard-boiled egg.

Combine this with a few radishes and some chopped fresh dill, and you have the makings of one of the best salads ever.

Dill and radishes are seriously the power combination for egg salad. Maybe you've always eaten your egg salad with celery as the crunchy veg component. That's all well and good--and you can absolutely add minced celery as well--but radishes, in my opinion, are even better. They're crunchy and spicy and add a beautiful touch of dark pink to the salad.

And dill! Dill is one of the most underused herbs ever, and it goes so perfectly with egg and mustard. It is, of course, totally fine to use parsley if that's what floats your boat, but you should absolutely try dill. It's the best cool counterpoint to spicy radish and rich egg.

Perfect picnic egg salad for two

4 hard-boiled eggs
2-3 radishes
1/4 bunch fresh dill/other herbs of your choice
2 scallions
1-2 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tsp dijon mustard
salt, pepper
rye or sourdough bread

Chop your eggs into pleasing chunks. Finely mince your radishes. Strip the dill fronds from their stems and chop them up. Trim a couple scallions and slice them into thin rounds.

Combine all your eggs and vegetables in a large mixing bowl. Add mayonnaise and mustard and mix, smashing with a fork to blend the egg yolks with the dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Spread your egg salad onto slices of toasted rye or sourdough bread. Other bread is also okay, of course, but the flavor and aroma of both rye and sourdough are hard to beat. It's also pretty delicious to spread your egg salad on cucumber slices if you want more vegetables, or for a big plate of appetizers. It's all good.

Now eat it! We had our egg salad sandwiches open-faced, with a side of cucumber shallot salad. Super delicious and refreshing on a summer afternoon.

We actually ended up eating everything at home, I'm sorry to say. It was just too blindingly sunny outside, and we are cloud-loving midwesterners, even after eight years of living in California. Fortunately, picnic food tastes just as good inside as out.

Next up: that cucumber shallot salad! Hooray!

How to pit cherries without a cherry pitter

I don't know about you guys, but I don't own a cherry pitter. For the most part, this means that I just don't bother pitting cherries or concocting much of anything out of them; instead, I just eat them.

However, sometimes you just need some pitted cherries.

So you don't have a cherry pitter. Do you have a paper clip? If so, you can go ahead and pit your cherries with wild abandon. Well, not too much abandon--you don't want cherry juice stains all over the kitchen. But you can pit your cherries with moderate abandon at least.

First, bend your paper clip into an S.

(Actually, first wash your paper clip and then bend it into an S. Washing not pictured.)

Insert the larger end of your paper clip into the stem scar of a cherry. Then just scoop around with the curve of the clip to dig out the pit.

Repeat until you've pitted all your cherries. Voila!

Now you can use your cherries in baking, blending, mixing, freezing or muddling--all without the threat of the pit.

Personally, I just pitted a few cherries to put in my pre-holiday beverage.

Cherry vodka tonic

3 pitted sweet cherries
vodka of your choice
tonic water
ice
lemon wedge

Muddle your cherries in the bottom of a cocktail glass. I think collins glasses are usual for vodka tonics, aren't they? Add several ice cubes, a shot (or your preferred amount) of vodka, and top with tonic. Squeeze a lemon wedge over the top before dropping it in. Mix gently and consume at your leisure.

I don't know about you, but my leisure is going to be pretty great this week. Tomorrow we're flying out to Portland for a few days--the only few days in the year, it seems, that Portland is going to have the exact same weather as Silicon Valley. Curses! We were hoping for some greyness after the unrelenting sun of California. On the other hand, this does mean we get to ride bikes around Portland with no need for rain gear. I hope all of you from the US have a similarly delightful holiday planned!

Peeling ginger with the spoon trick

It has come to my attention that many of you guys are using vegetable peelers or even knives to peel your fresh ginger.

You don't need anything even vaguely sharp to peel ginger easily. All you need is an ordinary spoon.

First, cut a piece of ginger to the size you need.

Then scrape the side of the spoon's bowl down your piece of ginger root, using a moderate amount of pressure. The skin will come right off.

Keep scraping until you've removed all the skin.

Notice how much easier it is to tackle curves and crevices with the spoon's rounded edge than with a straight peeler. And check out the results--unlike vegetable peelers, which strip off gashes of edible ginger along with the skin, spoons only remove the skin itself.

When you're done peeling, you can use a knife to trim off any dried-out broken edges.

Voila--perfectly peeled ginger!

Now make your ginger cake or delicious curry in good health and good conscience.