today we're going to talk about fermenting tomato paste and why you would want to do it and why I think this is a better option than canning so I went out to the garden I picked a bunch of my Roma tomatoes and a little small Italian tomato the cheese for sun-dried tomatoes I'm just washing them off getting all the stems off making sure and checking that there's not any bad spots that I need to later cut off next I'm gonna be going to the cutting board as always make sure you've got a really sharp knife that you can use when you're chopping up your vegetables I ended up having about thirty pounds of tomatoes when we first started I weighed everything out because the recipe or the place I saw where to ferment tomatoes was you would get about eight to ten percent weight from your beginning total so what we're gonna do is a wild fermentation it's a naturally occurring bacteria on the tomatoes and the airborne yeast make the perfect environment for lactic acid fermentation so why would I want to ferment tomatoes over canning tomatoes I did a bunch of tomatoes for canning I ended up with two quarts of marinara sauce after spending hours in the kitchen and it just wasn't worth my time and so I started looking into other alternatives besides canning and dehydrating Tomatoes so I'm hoping this wild fermentation is gonna work out for us so after I get all my tomatoes chopped up the next thing I need to do is start squeezing and crushing the tomatoes and like I said you're not gonna add any salt you're not gonna add any kind of store-bought culture or anything like that this is just a wild fermentation here I've got some gallon glass jars you want about a few inches of headspace once you push everything down because everything's gonna bubble and ferment I got my glass jars from either standard com they're a food co-op that's based out of Oregon a really nice company so just crush them up keep crushing them up I didn't have to add any water to these they just were really really juicy and I just crushed them until I got enough juice to cover everything really really well unlike a lot of fermentations where you're gonna put the cabbage leaf or weights on this you're not going to do that with this type of fermentation there's gonna be a white mold that grows a top on top of the fermentation and this is actually really good this shows you that it's fermenting its caught the wild yeast and that's just how it's gonna be you can't get around it not mold and it's part of the process so don't be scared when you open it up and you've got to look at the mold so these need to sit for four to five days depending on temperature so I'm pulling it out this I think it's set for 36 hours or so and I'm just stirring it all in pushing the white mold back down into the jar there's a lot of bubbles going on here and everything's just kind of getting all bubbly all the solids floated up to the top also so I had kind of a clearish liquid on the bottom here you can see it's it's not a putrid smell at all it's not rotting kind of smell it's just a really strong tomato just a really strong fermenting tomato smell alright guys so we've been for maintain about five days and it is time to now put the strain this put this through my squeeze o strainer and get out as much liquid as we can and then we are going to hang it in the cheesecloth just like you would choose to drain it and make tomato paste so as you can see the mold the mold is perfectly fine I mean you don't have to strain it but I just figure why spend all this extra time putting it through the squeeze oh and then you know straining extra liquid over the next couple of days alright so I'm just gonna put this in my squeeze o strainer and then we can start cranking this thing and I will allso be straining now go ahead and strain the next batch while I'm pushing this through all right so I just bought a cheesecloth and the craft section at Walmart I pulled it out and this is what I have all right so this is really then I'm wondering if I should have used like okay so this isn't completely opened up let's hope this holds here's my second one I'm gonna open it halfway not all the way this is my first time doing this like I said I am NOT into fermenting so this has been a huge project for me this week the smells which have been a little strange at times alright so I ended up using this entire 6-yard cheesecloth just because I can still see through and I'm afraid I'm going to lose all the bits of the tomatoes so I think this cost maybe close to 5 bucks at Walmart not an economical solution so we're going to come up with the different planks I've got two big bowls that I've got to do here so I'm slowly pour this in seems to be kind of layering like pushing through the first several layers of cheesecloth so we'll see how this works I'm going to I have I've got a piece of yarn so I'm going to kind of just bunch this all up go tight and not really really tight probably a few times because I don't want this to bust down from the place that I'm gonna be trying to hang this from I'm I'm not gonna hang it right away from the makeshift stand that we're doing because as you can see in here I've already had a lot of liquid coming out all right so my cut-up t-shirt I've sterilized it I boiled in water for several minutes I cut it up I'm just gonna I'm only using one side of the shirt because if I use two sides I'm afraid that it's gonna take multiple days to strain so we'll kind of see how this go so I'm just going to pour my strange liquid in here there we go this will be our improvised t-shirt experiment like I said I'd sterilized it want to make sure there's no weird germs or anything those washed and then sterilized okay right off the bat I'm noticing the liquid from this one is a lot clearer Josiah if you'll come in close the liquid that's draining from the t-shirt one the liquid is more of a yellowish and the liquid on the cheesecloth side is more pink so I think that this is going to probably end up being more beneficial in the end we don't have a fancy cheese hanging thing so we just grabbed a stick from outside you kind of washed it off some and I've got it between at this little book case I put veggies and it's on top of my Vitamix over here it's not the most stable in the world but I think it'll work for the next 48 hours while I hang this each one of these bags probably weighs about a good eight nine ten pounds I mean they're pretty heavy so whatever you put this on you want to make sure that it's really really stable keep the rest of your family out of it and don't let the kids knock it down and I'll show you in 24 hours what it looks like yes all right so I've strained this for about almost two days I probably should have opened it up yesterday so this is one of the bags you're supposed to get about eight to ten percent of what your original weight of tomatoes was so we will weigh this today that is one of our bags it is a little awkward to scrape it out that's for sure I'm trying not to be too messy okay this is the cheesecloth one this one looks I feel like I lost a lot of the tomato paste it looks like it sunk a lot into the cheesecloth so I feel like I'm gonna have a lot of waste on this one the t-shirt material that I used I put about half and a half and I definitely got way more tomato paste from the t-shirt I didn't get that much from this it's just really sunken in between the layers I don't see any way for me to scrape out any more than I've already got so it it does let's just be honest this looks like a I murdered somebody in my kitchen it's kind of crazy looking so I got way more out of the t-shirt material one thing my daughter did mention was that if anybody is feeling squeamish about using an old t-shirt and bleep and you could I wouldn't bleach it cuz I don't like to use bleach but we sterilize it in boiling water you could just go to a Walmart or somewhere and buy a t-shirt that's on sale for two bucks I mean they're on sale all the time at the end of the year so you could buy a bunch of dirt cheap or even in the thrift store buy brand new t-shirts so I'm gonna go get the scale and weigh this and see what we ended up with alright so I probably should have weighed the measuring cup before I went to put this in here but you can see how the tomato paste I mean it's a tomato paste it's really nice you're supposed to add 10 to 25% salt and that's what's going to preserve it and you'll be able to leave it on your counter the Italians they like to use 25 percent salt most Americans can only tolerate about 10 percent salt and then you can just kind of salt it to taste and we could probably estranged this a little bit more it's a little bit thin but I think the salt will absorb some of the moisture I like to use real salt Redmon's real salt so we're gonna start at 10% salt and kind of see where that leaves us and then you let it sit for a few hours and then you mix it up some more and then you can start tasting it so one and a half ounces let me turn on my scale and you don't have to use a scale I just have a scale because I make herbal products and things like that so I'm gonna pour that in you stir this in a really really good and this is gonna preserve the fermentation if you leave this on the countertop it'll last for a few months if you put it in the refrigerator it could last up to a year so as always when you make any kind of homemade products you need to label things date things so here I am labeling it for the refrigerator I did do a taste test on camera but somehow we lost that footage but when I tasted it it was super super super salty and but had this really bold amazing tomato flavor I was super impressed with the flavor but it was salty and I only did a 10 percent salt so if you want to go up to 25 percent that you could do that but it's a pretty it's pretty salty so watch out for that I ended up with one pound one ounce of tomato paste so I started with 30 pounds I think I got 1.1 pounds so I end up with about 3 percent and you're supposed to end up with 8 to 10 percent so I'm not really sure what went wrong there but here it is I hope you guys try this out I hope you enjoy this because I'm gonna be making some recipes in the future for this product