Thanks to the last tomato thread, I now have a garden full of beautiful, reddening, roma tomatoes free of BER. I’m looking at a yield of about 10-12 per day. I figure a week’s worth will give me enough to make sauce. I just need a way to keep the tomatoes I pick today to keep until Saturday.
Any suggestions?
Why not leave them on the vine for a few more days – nature’s own storage.
I’ve had tomatoes sitting around for several days without a problem. I put them on paper towels in a cool spot, not touching each other. Don’t put them in the fridge.
Dead easiest thing to do, as long as you’re going to make them into tomato sauce anyway and they don’t need to be “eatin’ fresh”–blanch them for a minute in boiling water, slip the skins off after they cool, then pop them into freezer bags or Tupperware and thence into the freezer.
Leaving them on the vine can result in them having holes eaten in them by bugs and birds. And IME, leaving them on the counter results in a booming fruit fly population in your kitchen, lots of happy little fruit flies disbelieving of their good luck in finding this massive free lunch all laid out for them. Of course, you can always nuke your kitchen from orbit when the harvest is over… 
Second the freezing bit. Easy, quick and you can store a lot until you are ready to go sauce/salsa happy.
I’d rather avoid freezing. Most of the spare freezer space is taken with Ice cream (Fang’s just had his tonsils out.) Also, I’m afraid freezing will kill the flavor. I know sticking tomatoes in the fridge does.
Freezing them also means that you don’t have to spend the next couple months in a marinara marathon. When you get fed up with making tomato sauce, you can leave the rest of the 'maters in the freezer until whenever you feel like you can make more without having your head explode.
After Christmas, even, if they’re in good-quality freezer bags, so they don’t freezer burn.
I wonder what I did wrong. I blanched and froze some tomatoes in freezer bags and when thawed, they had a chemical smell. The closest I can come to describing the smell is acetone. I tossed them.
We blanch & freeze for salsa and sauce tomatoes. Freezing screws the texture, so they’re no good for eating but fine for cooking.
But our big, happy, healthy, bushy plants have made no tomatoes this year. 
But how are the flavors?
The “refrigerating tomatoes kills their flavour” thing is a bit of a myth. Freezing and long-term refrigeration will affect the texture of a vine-ripened tomato, but not its flavour. So if you’re going to be cooking with them, you can just stick them in the fridge until Saturday.
I had a cold recently and everything I ate that had vinegar or tomato in it tasted JUST like it was doused with acetone/rubbing alcohol. I almost complained to the restaurant where I was eating lunch, it came on without any other symptoms. It wasn’t till the next day that I figured out what it was. After a week I was back to normal.
I’ve frozen tomatoes and left them for a few months without freezer burn – I think the skins protect them from that.
Well, if you blanch them and slip the skins before freezing like you’re supposed to, they don’t have skins.
Thawed-out frozen tomatoes have the same tomato flavor as the fresh tomatoes they once were, it’s just the texture that’s different, because the freezing process bursts the cells. They work fine in spaghetti sauce.
Well, I do it differently: I blanch them and peel them while they are frozen. Since the centre is frozen, then skins come off very easily after a short time in boiling water. Both ways would work, but yes, peeled tomatoes need to be kept in plastic bags in the freezer.
Flavor is fine. We freeze gallons and gallons of tomatoes, then make sauce & salsa over the next several months. Never had any problem with flavor. We have had some freezer burn, but only when we missed a bag and found it a year later.
ETA: I had planned to try the “skin after freezing” method this year. I guess that won’t be happening unless some miracle occurs. :mad:
re: Chemical odour
What your smelling is ethylene, it is given off by many ripening veggies/fruits. What happened is that it concentrated in the plastic bag and you got a strong whiff of it when you opened the bag. There was no need to toss the tomatoes. (In amounts that small its absolutely harmless…)
Also it will volatize harmlessly away when you cook them.
Regards
FML