Mesh strainer for tomatoes?

[Seven Bends]

I love to roast cherry tomatoes with garlic, oregano and olive oil, but I can't stand the skins and seeds, so after roasting I manually push them through a mesh kitchen strainer over a bowl to get a puree. Unfortunately, the mesh of my strainer is too fine, so it's a slow and tedious process.

The strainer is unmarked, but I count 24 squares per inch. I'm looking for something coarser than that, but I'm striking out with online shopping. Everything seems to be basically the same, all "fine" mesh everywhere.

Can anyone suggest a good strainer for this purpose, preferably stainless steel? Thanks for any help!

[Dawn]

You need a food mill



Or one of these

[pepperhead212]

Yes, unfortunately that's what you find on strainer labels - fine, extra fine, medium, and coarse, which are all sort of vague. The only thing I've seen the #/inch listed on are things used for sifting, but those usually aren't strong enough to press things through.

[peebee]

What about a colander you have already, does it have bigger holes? The one I have now has vertical slits but I used to have a stainless steel one with holes that I used to strain tomatoes with.

[bower]

I make the same kind of sauce roasted, let it cool and evaporate moisture overnight, and then run it through the blender. That takes care of the skins really well, although there is the occasional seed left that tastes a little bitter, the overall taste of the sauce is really sweet. I use mine for pizza sauce, and did not see or taste any seeds in the final context, only when dabbing a bit to taste the freshly blended stuff.
I love the look of the food mill though. Bet it makes some classy stuff.

[MissS]

I use something like this ExcelSteel Food Mill W/3 Grinding Sizes, 17" x 8.25" x 3.75", for Versatile Textures in Soups, Sauces, and Foods from Amazon. Sometimes if I'm tired and doing lots of tomatoes, I just put them in the blender, puree them and pour them in a bag to freeze.

[worth1]

A chinois is what it's called.
The cone strainer like in the picture is what my mom and I used for years.
Then the hot pulp was squeezed in cheese cloth to get out any remaining juices.
The pulp was then given to the chickens.
We put up a ton of product every year.

Looking back I can't help but think of all the time wasted on the farm doing stuff like this manually.
Our pantry for home canned goods was about 20 feet long with 2 foot deep shelves from floor to ceiling.
It was in another outside building.
My mom would give me a shopping list and off I would go.
If I'm getting this straight the cheese cloth would go into the cone strainer and then the hot tomatoes and mashed through like that.
The strainer sat in a big kettle.
Once the kettle was full the stuff would be transferred into the bigger kettle on the stove for cooking down.

[MissS]

Well for some reason I can't post a link to Amazon right now. There is a food mill that has 3 different mesh sizes to strain the pulp and seeds out.

[Sue_CT]

Mine does, too. I think mine is Oxo. The prices have gone up with COVID. You might Try Bed, BAth and Beyond if there is one near you. They always have 20% off one item couponns. Think I paid about 39.99.

[Seven Bends]

Thanks for all the replies and suggestions!

[mention]Dawn[/mention], [mention]MissS[/mention] and [mention]Sue_CT[/mention] I wasn't considering a food mill because I had heard they don't work very well for tomatoes, but it sounds like maybe you've had good experiences with them? I'll look at the ones you've linked to above and investigate a little further. Maybe that's the best solution. We do still have one BB&B store remaining nearby, and the coupon is a good suggestion.

[mention]peebee[/mention] The colander I have is the old-fashioned metal kind with largish round holes, so it would filter the skins but not the seeds. I can pop the skins off the cherry tomatoes by hand after roasting (time-consuming but kind of fun in a weird way); it's more the seeds that are the problem for me.

[mention]Bower[/mention] For some reason I'm really bothered by the bitter taste of the seeds and the texture of any bits of skin. I suspect the blending solution wouldn't work for me, but maybe if I tried it I'd be surprised.

[mention]pepperhead212[/mention] The strainer descriptions online are frustrating, so little info and the pictures are no help. I'm assuming my current strainer probably is "fine" and that I need either medium or coarse. I'd like stainless steel but the only not-fine one I've found in stainless is $50, too high for me. I've found a couple of medium and coarse choices in "retinned" steel, with reviews complaining about instant rusting. Maybe I'll try one of them and just be very careful about drying after washing.

[mention]Dawn[/mention] and [mention]worth1[/mention] I've never used a Chinois and didn't know they existed until I started this strainer search. I wonder what the advantage is over using a normal, bowl-shaped strainer -- maybe that the mortar pushes all around the sides, so it's more surface area?

[worth1]

[mention]Seven Bends[/mention]
Yes the mortar does as you said.
It can be used for many things too.
Like jelly and creamy soups.
Ours stayed busy all the time.

[Sue_CT]

You do have to keep cleaning them as the skins pile up. I fill it about 3/4 full, turn it until it seems to be clogging then turn it backwards which pulls up the skins then forward again, and keep going until all the juice and pulp is out. I use a rubber spatula to remove the dryish skins and seeds. It is trial and error. I prefer to use the medium disc which allows some small seeds through but does not clog as quickly as the finest one. If I was doing bushels of tomatoes it would probably be too much work, actually more than probably, lol. But it certainly does beat pushing them through a strainer by hand.

[Whwoz]

The likes of the Oxo one should do exactly pretty much what you want. Mum an equivalent for her tomato sauce and like [mention]Sue_CT[/mention] says, just turn handle backwards to remove surplus skins or seeds. One can always free up the skins then grind them up small by rapidly rotating handle without adding extra tomatoes

[worth1]

My tomato plant produced small round tomatoes that had skins as thick as parchment paper.
They were volunteers from seeds of a juliett tomato.
Tasty but the skins were unbelievably thick.

[mama_lor]

I can't seem to see the pictures posted for some reason, but this is the kind of thing you need:
https://www.agrieuro.de/manuelle-tomate ... 11553.html

There's also a larger size for more tomatoes, this is the one I got, I made 15kg with ease, you just need to remove the core of raw tomatoes, cut them in big chinks and push them in a bit and turn, the skins and seeds come out at the end of the cone. It did not get stuck at all, at the end I put the collected 'waste' once more through it to get quite a bit more pulp, it also didn't get stuck at all. Worth the money. I had a very heavy old one before made of simple steel (which rusted heavily) with the soviet star printed on it, it was still ok but got stuck often (the strainer was a cylinder instead of a cone, which made all the pressure develop only at the end of the cylinder, the cone is a smarter design).

Not sure what equivalents are in usa, but it's worth getting a good quality one if you use it every year.

[Ginger2778]

Food mill is the way to go. They work really really well, and very fast! If your tomatoes are cooked. Not good for raw.(duh!) I got mine at Bed Bath and Beyond, it was under $30.

[Seven Bends]

[mention]mama_lor[/mention] That's a beautiful tomato strainer! I decided against buying a strainer like that because I'm just looking for something very quick and easy that doesn't require assembly to use or much clean-up afterwards. I have access to my mother's Kitchen Aid with strainer attachment for big jobs. Out of curiosity I did some googling and it looks like the Reber manual machines aren't readily available here, though a few places sell the electric ones. The closest I found (all metal, similar design) was a Leonardi at $200! I'll keep the Reber and Leonardi information in case my needs change in the future; thanks for the suggestion.

[mention]Ginger2778[/mention], [mention]Sue_CT[/mention] and others who suggested food mills -- I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond yesterday and bought the Oxo food mill posted by [mention]Sue_CT[/mention] with a 20%-off coupon (those coupons aren't so easy to find anymore!), making it about $40. I also bought a cheap hand strainer there with a coarser mesh than what I have; I could have saved myself a lot of internet searching time on that hand strainer if I had just gone to the store in the first place. I hope to try out the food mill tonight.

Thanks again to everyone for weighing in; this was very helpful and interesting.

[Sue_CT]

Hope it is what you needed!

[Seven Bends]

I finally tried out the food mill, and it's pretty much a miracle! What an easy way to get the seeds and skin out. I roasted three baking pans of cherry tomatoes -- one each of Sungold, Super Snow White, and Braveheart -- and ran each through the mill separately, so now I have small jars of delicious, smooth orange sauce, yellow sauce, and red sauce. A whole baking dish (9x13) of roasted tomatoes fit in the mill at once, and it took less than five minutes to run each batch through. Clean-up was easy. I'm a convert!

My only minor complaint is that the strainer disk with the smallest holes (the one I need for tomatoes) is very slightly warped, so if I don't get it inserted exactly right, there's some scraping of metal on metal. I've found that if that happens, it helps to pop out the disk and rotate it a third of the way around in the mill, then pop it back in. So, now I know to check for grinding before putting the tomatoes in. The other two disks are fine. I may call Oxo to see if they'll send a replacement disk.

Thanks again, everyone.

[Ginger2778]

I finally tried out the food mill, and it's pretty much a miracle! What an easy way to get the seeds and skin out. I roasted three baking pans of cherry tomatoes -- one each of Sungold, Super Snow White, and Braveheart -- and ran each through the mill separately, so now I have small jars of delicious, smooth orange sauce, yellow sauce, and red sauce. A whole baking dish (9x13) of roasted tomatoes fit in the mill at once, and it took less than five minutes to run each batch through. Clean-up was easy. I'm a convert!

My only minor complaint is that the strainer disk with the smallest holes (the one I need for tomatoes) is very slightly warped, so if I don't get it inserted exactly right, there's some scraping of metal on metal. I've found that if that happens, it helps to pop out the disk and rotate it a third of the way around in the mill, then pop it back in. So, now I know to check for grinding before putting the tomatoes in. The other two disks are fine. I may call Oxo to see if they'll send a replacement disk.

Thanks again, everyone.

I'm so glad it worked out for you. I love my food mill. I sometimes want my sauce to have a bit more texture, so I use the mid size, it lets only few seeds in and pretty much no skin at all and I get a very slight amount of small chunkiness to my sauce, but especially to my tomato soup.
If I got sent a warped disk, I would definitely call the company.