The Early Girl tomato is a popular, early-ripening hybrid favored by home gardeners for its reliable, prolific yield. As one of the first tomatoes to mature, it presents a timely challenge for preservation. Canning this variety requires understanding its specific physical properties and necessary safety protocols. This article evaluates the Early Girl tomato’s effectiveness and safety for home canning.
Defining the Early Girl Tomato’s Characteristics
The Early Girl is a globe-type slicing tomato, characterized by its uniform, round shape, often reaching the size of a tennis ball and weighing between four and eight ounces. When fully ripe, the fruit displays a bright red color and offers a balanced flavor profile that is both sweet and slightly tangy. The flesh is often described as “meaty.”
Compared to a paste variety like Roma, the Early Girl has a higher inherent water content and more abundant seed cavities, typical of a slicer. This structure means its solids-to-liquid ratio is lower than varieties bred for processing. The skin is also generally thinner than that of paste tomatoes, which influences the preparation process for canning.
Suitability for Canning vs. Freezing
The Early Girl tomato can be canned, but its high moisture content affects the resulting texture and consistency. During the long heat processing required for safe canning, the cell walls of the tomato break down significantly, especially in varieties with more water. This yields a thinner, more watery final product, meaning canned Early Girls are better suited for a sauce or juice rather than whole or diced tomatoes intended to hold their shape.
Canning a slicing tomato requires immediate and thorough heating during preparation to manage the pectin-degrading enzyme. This prevents the solids and liquids from separating into distinct layers in the jar. If a home canner seeks a thick, dense product like a paste or chunky salsa, they must cook down Early Girls for a considerably longer time than a low-moisture paste tomato. This extended reduction time concentrates the flavor but also uses more energy and requires more attention.
Freezing presents an alternative preservation method that is simpler and often preserves the fresh flavor more effectively. Freezing causes the water within the tomato’s cells to expand, rupturing the cell walls. Upon thawing, the tomato becomes extremely soft and pulpy, making it unusable for fresh slicing but perfectly suited for cooked applications like soup or sauce.
Freezing also offers the convenience of processing a large harvest in smaller, more manageable batches later in the year. The thawed tomatoes are already semi-prepared for sauce-making. While frozen tomatoes should be used within 8 to 12 months for peak quality, this method bypasses the initial intense canning session. Ultimately, canning is a safe choice for the Early Girl, but the expectation should be a thinner, sauce-like texture, whereas freezing preserves the flavor with minimal upfront effort.
Essential Safety Requirements for Canning Tomatoes
All home-canned tomatoes require the addition of acid to ensure a safe product, regardless of the variety. This mandatory step is necessary because many modern tomato cultivars, including the Early Girl, can have a final pH level above the critical threshold for safe water-bath canning. The risk involves the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which produces a deadly toxin and is prevented from growing only in low-acid environments.
A food product must have a pH of 4.6 or lower to be classified as high-acid and safely processed in a boiling water canner. Since tomato acidity fluctuates based on ripeness and growing conditions, canning instructions mandate adding acid to every jar. The standard acidification rule is to add two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice or one-half teaspoon of crystalline citric acid per quart jar.
It is important to use commercially bottled lemon juice, as its acidity is standardized and reliable. The acid should be added directly to the empty jar before the tomatoes are packed in. Even when using a pressure canner, the addition of acid is still required to meet current safety standards.
Recommended Preparation Techniques for Early Girls
The preparation process for Early Girl tomatoes begins with removing the skin, which is necessary for a high-quality canned product. This is most efficiently done by blanching, where the tomatoes are submerged in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds until the skin begins to crack. They are then immediately plunged into an ice bath to stop the cooking. After this thermal shock, the skins can be easily slipped off, which also helps reduce the microbial load on the fruit’s surface.
Given the Early Girl’s tendency toward textural breakdown, it is recommended to can them as crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce rather than trying to preserve them whole or diced. To prevent the solids from separating from the liquid during processing, a hot-pack method is preferred over a raw pack. This involves heating the peeled, cored, and quartered tomatoes thoroughly in a pot before filling the jars, which inactivates the enzyme responsible for pectin degradation.
For a true hot-pack, tomatoes should be gently crushed and heated to a boil for five minutes before being filled into the jars. This preparation ensures a uniform texture and minimizes floating and separation in the finished product. Proper packing also requires leaving a half-inch headspace at the top of the jar, which allows for the expansion that occurs during the heat processing.