Editor’s note: This article was written by Marvin Baker on Oct. 29 of last year and featured in the Foundation for Agricultural and Rural Resources Management and Sustainability (FARRMS) newsletter. Baker recently retired as a commercial gardener.

Here on our farm it gets to a point that we welcome the first frost because the workload becomes so overwhelming; most of that work involves tomatoes.

And, as the season winds down, customers are tired of all the tomatoes they’ve received in the past couple of months. That means there is only one thing to do and that is to process the ripe tomatoes into something. It could be salsa, it could be spaghetti sauce, it could be tomato juice, soup, paste or sauce. We also process whole tomatoes.
There’s a couple of ways to look at this. First, as a commercial gardener, there is no guarantee we will get a bountiful crop so we plant enough tomatoes (approximately 700 plants) to feel confident in offering them to our customers and shareholders.

What actually happens is we become inundated with the fruit, yes, the tomato is a fruit, unless you are in New Jersey where it’s the official vegetable of the state of New Jersey. In any event, it leaves plenty for us to process at the end of the season.
The second thing to look at here is the cost of tomatoes. In the middle of October, I processed 100 pounds of tomatoes primarily so I wouldn’t lose them to spoilage. I didn’t think about this until I was at the stove cooking the tomato juice down to a paste.

One-hundred pounds is a lot and had we sold those tomatoes in small packages, as we do every week at North Prairie Farmers’ Market in Minot, it would have earned us $500. Most people can’t, or don’t want to afford that kind of quantity so we generally give a break on the price of larger orders. We’ve done 2-for-1, we’ve sold tomatoes for charity, we give free tomatoes with purchase, people have u-picked and we’ve come up with numerous other ideas and we still have tomatoes.
That said, former FARRMS intern and now employee Tobi Byrne and I recently went to work processing tomatoes. I put her in charge of the Jack LaLanne power juicer that takes out skins and seeds while I gathered items to process a couple of bushels into spaghetti sauce. It didn’t stop there. Because we use a lot of tomato paste, why buy it when we can make it? So, we canned 72 jars of tomato paste in a period of about a month.

Tomato juice is another great benefit. When you buy tomato juice, it is chock full of sodium. When you make it, you control the amount of sodium, thus it’s healthier and tastier.

There are two things I’ve done to make homemade tomato juice actually taste good without the sodium. First, I use an heirloom tomato called Black Krim. It’s the ugliest looking tomato, but the best tasting. Second, the juice is seasoned with herbs and celery. As a result, I won’t be buying tomato juice all winter.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the varieties that we use in addition to Black Krim.

First off, we like Rutgers, which is the official vegetable of New Jersey. These tomatoes usually grow large and are the most uniform shape. We grow Scotia, an Atlantic Canada slicer variety that is prolific at our latitude. Manitoba is also a slicer that is the most closely acclimated tomato to North Dakota, having been developed only 180 miles from here in Morden, Manitoba.

In paste tomatoes we use San Marzano and Striped Roman. Customers at the farmers’ market often ask us about Romas. We tell them we gave up Romas years ago in favor of a superior tasting tomato in San Marzano. We’ve since discovered the Striped Roman. Customers, however, are becoming wise to the flavor profile of the San Marzano and Striped Roman.
In the kitchen, it can be any one of those varieties or it can be a hodgepodge of varieties that we cook down, in some cases so thick a spoon will stand up in the bubbling liquid. And there is nothing better than vine-ripened tomatoes to create a more flavorful processed product.

North Star Farms has been in business 20 years and it was never our intent or part of our business plan to get into canning. As mentioned, it was created out of necessity to prevent spoilage. Because of that, we believe we’ve gotten good at this task and now offer tomato products to our farmers’ market customers.