Zero Waste: Freeze Tomato Juice

How often do you open a tin of tomatoes and end up tipping most of the liquid away?  This is one thing that you can have zero waste with if you freeze the tomato juice.

A lot of the times I use tinned tomatoes it’s as part of a cooked breakfast.  When I use the tomatoes I carefully pick out each tomato from the tin, then cut the top part off (I don’t like them), then I put the tomato into the cooking dish and I end up with half a tin of pure tomato juice.

It’s a shame to waste it – and it’s easily used in other dishes you cook.

How to Freeze Tomato Juice: 

1. Fit a small freezer bag into a mug, or beaker, or other small pot.
2. Tip the tomato juice into the bag in the mug.
3. Pop the mug into the freezer for about an hour – at this point it should be frozen, it’s certainly frozen enough for you to remove the freezer bag from the mug and pop the small pack of frozen tomato into a small corner of the freezer.

Using Frozen Tomato Juice:

You can use this tomato juice by adding it into any stew, casserole, or slow cooker food you cook in the coming months.  The tinned tomato juice I pour out and save is usually roughly 200ml of juice per can, which is a great quantity to use as a quick starting point when I make a tomato sauce to go with spaghetti, especially spaghetti with meatballs!

It’s best to defrost it first, which you can do by putting the bag (in a mug) in the fridge overnight, or by defrosting it in the microwave by removing the tomato from the freezer bag and then microwaving in a microwave safe dish or jug for about 2 minutes.

Most of my frozen tomato juice is thrown into the slow cooker when I make chilli con carne, but it can be used in any recipe that asks for passata!