Tomatoes may be frozen raw or cooked, whole, sliced, chopped, or puréed. Tomatoes do not need to be blanched before freezing. Frozen tomatoes are best used in cooked foods such as soups, sauces and stews as they become mushy when they're thawed.
Place the tomatoes in a gallon-sized zip-top freezer bag. Force out as much air as possible and tightly seal the bag. Freeze the tomatoes. Lay the bag flat in the freezer and freeze until solid, at least 6 hours but preferably overnight.
Whole tomatoes tend to crack and collapse when they thaw. To successfully freeze fresh raw tomatoes, you can: Slice tomatoes into at least 1/2-inch slices.
If desired, halve, slice, or chop tomatoes (you can also freeze whole tomatoes). Spoon the tomatoes into freezer containers or bags, leaving 1-inch headspace. Seal and label the container or bag. Freeze for up to 10 months.
Place the tomatoes into large resealable freezer bags in a single layer and be sure to remove as much air out of the bag as possible. Seal the bag. Now they are ready to freeze!
If you are completely swamped with garden tomatoes and your season is done. You can freeze tomatoes at any stage of ripeness. I have frozen them green. I mix the green ones into my soups and sauces with the ripe ones and they work out fine.
It's simply an unnecessary step. Just freeze your whole tomatoes raw, with the skins on, and defrost what you want to use each time. Once you cook the tomatoes down or puree them, you won't even notice they had skins on anyway.
Frozen tomatoes hold their flavor fairly well. “Thaw and dump” pint or quart-sized portions conveniently found in the freezer section of your very own kitchen hold a lot of appeal and will add a bit of summer to those cool weather comfort foods.
Frozen tomatoes become soft after thawing so you wouldn't be able to use them raw, such as in a BLT sandwich. For cooking though, they are perfectly fine. In fact, freezing tomatoes for sauce is ideal when it's tomato season yet you don't have time to make sauce until after the summer harvest rush.
While the freezer does impact a tomato's texture, it doesn't ruin its vibrant, acidic flavor. Some diehard canners will argue that canning tomatoes preserves more of the fresh flavor, and they may be right.
Freezing tomatoes let you enjoy summer ripened tomatoes in the winter. Sure they lose some flavor as any fresh frozen produce will, but they are still great to cook with. Freezing tomatoes is one of the easiest and quickest ways to preserve them.
Lay the tomatoes out on a flat freezer-proof sheet, in a single layer and not touching, and place in your freezer. Once they're fully frozen, transfer your tomatoes to sealable plastic bags and return to the freezer where they'll keep for six months or more.
Make sure you keep the temperature of the freezer at 0°F or below to ensure proper freezing. Frozen tomatoes will retain their flavor for 12 months. This gives you plenty of time to thaw them to use in your favorite sauce, stew, or soup recipes.
To sum it up, canned tomatoes don't taste like fresh tomatoes, but at least they taste like cooked tomatoes. Frozen then thawed tomatoes don't taste neither like fresh, nor like cooked. They are just not that good to eat. Frozen tomatoes will lose all their structure, so are only of use for cooking.
However, frozen tomatoes are excellent to use in soup, stew, sauce, chili, or for canning later. If you think about it, canning your summer tomatoes during the slower cold days of winter is a great way to stay connected with the garden during the off season!
The best way to freeze tomatoes depends on how you plan to use them. If you intend to make a sauce or a dish that would be better without the skins and seeds, be sure to remove those before freezing. First score and blanch the tomatoes, and then peel off the skin and squeeze out the seeds.
As glass jars became more widely available, however, Italians began preserving their tomatoes by filling jars with their homegrown produce and submerging them in boiling water for sterilization. This process, known as “bain-marie,” is still used today.
To ensure a uniform, smooth texture. Tomato skins are tough and hard to chew, so removing them before you make sauces – especially canned sauces – is important. Avoid bitter flavor.