Tomato juice for the winter - two recipes for homemade tomato juice
Tomato juice is prepared slightly differently than regular tomato juice. But, like tomato juice, it can be used as a borscht dressing or for preparing main courses. What is the difference between juice and fruit drink? Firstly - taste. Tomato juice is more sour, and this taste has its fans who prefer to make fruit juice rather than juice.
An old recipe for tomato juice
Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers prepared fruit juice using this recipe when there were no refrigerators, and few people had heard of pasteurization. This is a fairly simple recipe, but the fruit drink turns out amazing. Spicy and sour – this is exactly what you need to dilute the blandness of any dish.
To prepare fruit juice, you only need ripe tomatoes. It is better to put the overripe and green ones aside and use them for cooking. adzhiki.
Tomatoes should be washed, cut into two parts and the hard attachment point of the stalk removed.
Then, the tomatoes are placed in a pan in layers and sprinkled with coarse salt. And so on, layer by layer, until you fill the entire pan.
Now you need to put a wooden circle on the tomatoes and put pressure on top. In this state, the tomatoes should stand for at least 3 days in a warm place.When juice and foam appear on top, and a specific sour smell appears, the oppression can be removed and the pan taken to the cellar, covering it with a thick cloth.
As needed, scoop up the fruit drink with pieces of tomato in a mug, grind it through a sieve, and use it for its intended purpose.
Now this method has been somewhat improved, because not everyone has a basement or cellar, but the workpieces need to be stored.
A modern way to prepare tomato juice
In this case, you should use the same criteria for selecting tomatoes as in the previous recipe.
Wash the tomatoes, cut them into pieces convenient for you and grind them through a meat grinder, along with the skin. It is important! After all, the skin contains the enzymes necessary for souring.
Pour the resulting juice into bottles, about 2/3 of the jar. Cover them with napkins and place them in a warm place for a couple of days. When a “cap” of foam forms on top of the juice, you can interrupt the souring and begin further preparing tomato juice for the winter.
If you wish, you can rub the juice through a sieve to get rid of seeds and skins, but this is not necessary. Pour the juice into a saucepan, add salt and bring to a boil. Tomato juice needs to be boiled down, periodically removing the foam until it stops appearing. Usually this is 20-25 minutes, over low heat.
Now you can roll up tomato juice, just like regular tomato juice.
Pour it into sterilized bottles, close the lids (plastic ones are possible), and you can immediately take them to a cool place for winter storage.
Watch the video on how to prepare tomato juice for the winter: