Quote:
Originally Posted by semi_lucid
It surprises me that they loose that much weight.
That would be 33 pounds of tomatoes for each gallon of finished sauce. If the finished sauce weighs around 8 pounds, that means that you are loosing around 75% of the weight.
Half of that weight loss would be from the cook down, but still your loosing 37.5% at the mill. I'm guessing at least half of that must be water.
That must be a nice thick sauce, as you said.  |
It's even worse when you dry them...you lose about 90% of weight
which is why sun-dried tomatoes are so expensive.
And if you are using just any old tomato. it's worse too. The ones I grow (and my son) are dry-ish and have few seeds. I had a friend who picked about 10 lbs of tomatoes and thought it would be enough for 8 quarts. She thought "a pound equals a quart" was a fair estimate!
Somewhere I read a table of "how many tomato plants to grow to have X-amount of finished sauce" and it was way more plants than than I would have guessed.