Wait, Are Canned Tomatoes Already Cooked?

Canned tomatoes are a kitchen staple. When you can't get your hands on a sweet, vine-ripened summer tomato, you can always reach into your pantry for a can of tomatoes picked and preserved at their peak ripeness and flavor.

You can turn a humble can of tomatoes into dozens of delicious recipes. You can cook them down with garlic and onions into a rich marinara sauce (or two), stir them into a bubbling pot of tomato soup or minestrone, or blend them up with jalapenos and cilantro for a restaurant-style salsa to serve with tortilla chips.

While there is no shortage of uses for a can of tomatoes and all their varieties — diced, whole, crushed, fire-roasted, and so on — there are some jobs in the kitchen that canned tomatoes are not well-suited for. That is because canned tomatoes are already cooked, so any recipes with raw tomatoes cannot be substituted with canned varieties.

After tomatoes are picked from the field, they get cooked during the canning process. This helps to retain their flavor and texture for long periods of storage, but it does make canned tomatoes unsuitable for some recipes that use raw tomatoes. The picked tomatoes are sent to a processing plant that is usually in close proximity to the field where they were grown. After getting cleaned, the tomatoes are peeled either by getting blanched in hot water for a short time or receiving a steam bath that lifts the skin from the flesh of the tomato. The tomatoes continue to be processed after peeling, either being left whole, crushed, diced, or puréed, depending on the type of tomato getting processed. Pristine specimens of tomatoes are typically kept whole, while tomatoes of lesser quality get diced or crushed.

Then, the tomatoes are put into cans and submerged in a filler liquid, typically tomato purée or juice, before getting sealed and pressure cooked. The cans are heated up and held at high temperatures to the point that the tomatoes inside are sterilized, which cooks the tomatoes.

The cooking process is what makes the tomatoes last for so long at room temperature, so there is no way around preserving tomatoes without a cooking process. This does not matter much for balanced homemade tomato sauces, in which canned tomatoes are preferred, but they should not be used for things like salads or bruschetta with fresh chopped tomatoes due to their softer and wetter texture than raw tomatoes. If you ask me though, it is a small price to pay to be able to use sweet, ripe tomatoes any time of year.