Tomato Jam

Dear Turkey,
Thank you for sharing our canning exploits for posterity. Here is my canning adventure from Saturday:
First, let me say that, if you have a baby, you need, in addition to people to help you can, people to hold your baby far away from all the boiling pots of splattering liquid. Luckily my mom's friend, upon the first drop of our delicious tomato jam touching her lips, offered her services. Yes, it is so good that even retired people will hold the world's most adorable baby for an afternoon in exchange for a few jars (it's bring your own jars, by the way).
We have been making tomato jam since 2008, and it's probably our most popular canned item. It's also the biggest production, since it sets up by cooking down instead of with pectin. That means several hours of boiling tomatoes (which also means that it really isn't worth sterilizing the jars until it's almost done, if you use a water bath, or your water bath will be boiling for many hours for no reason; in other words, wait until it's almost set up, them turn on the water bath and then do the jars right before you fill them). This recipe was inspired by Mark Bittman, although we've changed it quite a bit.
Here's what we did for a peck of tomatoes (8 qts. just picked from your garden [which if it's been a good year like this one will take five minutes] and washed):
1. Roast 3 sweet onions (peeled and sliced) and 3 heads of garlic (peeled) in a little olive oil at 425 until soft and a little golden (about 30 mins).
2 Combine that with 10 cups of sugar and 20 teaspoons of salt (can you tell we multiplied a smaller recipe?).
3. Add the tomatoes, quartered and cored.
4. Simmer, stirring, for as many hours as you can (it goes faster if you divide it in a few pots -- it took me about 3 hrs).
You will know it's done when it changes color to a nice dark red and gets sticky.
Then add chili oil to taste (usually about 1-2 tablespoons for each 6oz jar of finished product -- this recipe may yield 25-30 jars that size).
Fill sterilized jars leaving 1/8-1/4 inch headspace and process for 10 mins in a boiling water bath.
Since this is a canning project with oil, I wouldn't reprocess jars that don't seal; if that happens, just freeze that jar or eat it right away in the fridge.

This is how it looks when you first start cooking it

Then you can see everything starting to break down after an hour or so

Yay. One of my great pleasures in life: jars full of stuff that we grew

I moss you,
Tofu