How To Make Homemade Tomato Juice

Just about every family has an eccentric or even a crazy uncle.  You know – the kind of uncle that is one card short of a full deck.  The uncle you dread appearing at thanksgiving dinner with his wild conspiracy theories and fringe politics.  The sort of embarrassing uncle you wish would just stay away.

Then there is the favorite uncle.  Most members of a family have favorite uncles as these are the elder statesmen that you identify-with and have an affinity-for.

Uncle Dick's family and mine grew-up at opposite ends of the block.  We were close.  It was almost like having brothers and sisters that lived in a house of their own.

Richard was my pop's little brother and my favorite uncle.  He's been gone three dozen years now and I still think about him from time to time.  Especially when making homemade tomato juice.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of my favorite Uncle Dick making tomato juice.  That's weird isn't it?  Growing-up in the 1960s I think most every family had a Foley Food Mill for grinding-up all sorts of stuff like apples and tomatoes.  I recently discarded the ancestral food mill that had been languishing in the basement.  It was dented and rusty and the paint was flaking from the wooden handles – likely lead-based paint too.  I have a newer, stainless model of the Foley mill that I purchased at Fleet Farm.  The home canning aficionado's all-purpose resource - Fleet Farm has everything you need.  But I digress.

About the juice.

There is no written record of Uncle Dick's tomato juice recipe but since I’ve been making the stuff for more than a half-dozen years it does exist in the ether of the world wide web.

I fetched a bunch of jars of canned tomatoes from last year's garden.  The tomatoes have already been peeled and cooked via the canning process so it is a simple matter to dump them into the mill and merrily go about grinding them into juice.  

It's rather old-school as far as juicing goes but it works just fine.  Do you have any idea how lip-smacking yummy canned homegrown tomatoes are when you pop the lid off?

Wow!  It sends you right back to August and September.

Periodically removing the pulp for the compost bin and grinding away I filled my largest stainless stock pot.

Gently raise the heat until just shy of a boil, fill sterilized quart jars and process in the canner for another fifteen minutes.  When the lids pop they're good to go.

Thirteen quarts of bottled red sunshine. 

Thanks for the inspiration Uncle Dick - you're the best!
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* A word about the jars and lids.  Sterilize your jars by immersing them in boiling water or running them through the dishwasher on the 'sanitize' cycle.  Lids are easy - in the microwave heat a Pyrex measurer full of water to a boil. Drop your lids in the hot water.  Fish them out with a sterile tongs.