I bought a new Victorio strainer in the spring, mainly for dealing with grapes, but I thought I would try it for tomatoes.
I grew Costoluto Genovese, hoping to make wonderful sauce, knowing that they are tricky to peel, I trusted that my strainer would take care of them, and put up with the horrible BER that they succumbed to all for the sake of some wonderful sauce.
When there was a glut of tomatoes and I unable to keep up with them, I did as I always do with all the extras, and froze them in 1 gallon freezer bags.
My usual modus operandi is to run each tomato under the tap until the skin splits to remove it, then to leave them in colanders with bowls underneath to collect water as they thawed. This time, I left them in their bags to warm up slowly in a huge cooler.
Today was the day, and the new strainer was washed, dried and assembled. The tomatoes were mostly thawed, and I tried it out. It jammed. I peeled a bag of tomatoes (what a pain). Victorio liked them peeled and gave me no trouble. However, I thought it really should do its job, and I fed it some with peels on. Not too bad, but after a while it jammed. I put it into reverse as the instructions say to do and things wobbled and creaked and juice leaked from where it shouldn't. It got going again and then the unthinkable happened and it exploded! A slight exaggeration, but it does have a very tight spring which sprang
.
Major clean-up and re-assembly was needed. A pile more tomatoes were processed before it exploded again necessitating a major kitchen clean-up Grrrrr
!
I peeled the few remaining tomatoes and tossed them in the sauce. I think I will go back to my old method because quite frankly it is less exhausting and requires less cleaning.
BTW my strainer seemed particularly bothered with the Costoluto, some of which were rather woody!
I wonder if it will work any better with grapes .....
Linda