We grew approximately 100lbs of tomatoes this year. I was VERY happy. However, we don’t tend to eat raw tomatoes. I use a lot of tomato sauce, however, so when I picked all of our tomatoes before they’d ripened I had to figure out how to ripen them indoors.
Why did I pick them early, you may ask. Well, two reasons. First, the turkeys figured out how to jump the fence and were eating all the ripe ones. Secondly, our great pyr got mad at us when we went on vacation and destroyed my tomato bushes with his big furry body. /sigh
I originally laid all the tomatoes out on our dinning room table. Unfortunately it took the entire table and we do eat there, so I acquired some brown paper grocery bags from my wonderful mother-in-law and started loading the tomatoes into it. My husband wanted to see which would ripen the tomatoes better, an apple or a banana. So some bags had apples and some bananas. I can now safely say apples do a better job. The banana bag still had a lot of green tomatoes in it.
I wanted to ripen the tomatoes quickly because of space constraints and because I knew I wanted to can all of them. I didn’t want to be doing small cannings for the foreseeable future so I sped up the ripening and canned a massive batch of sauce over an entire Sunday.
I used the roasted tomato sauce recipe I posted about Here.
It took about 2 weeks to get 90% of the tomatoes ripe using the bags. I did check them and remove any ripe tomatoes and put them on the table to wait. I also removed any tomatoes that were rotting at that time. I did not have that many tomatoes rot in the bags and it wasn’t a big issue for me to check them. I will use this method again in the future.
Now, I have 10% of the tomatoes left in a bag and I guess that means I have to do another canning at some point. Save me!