Seed Extraction Techniques

[maf]

I cut my tomatoes into slices and use the point of a knife to extract the seed from each slice into a ramekin or a small bowl.

Relatively un-messy, and I get to eat the tomato slices afterward!

[ContainerTed]

Originally Posted by maf

I cut my tomatoes into slices and use the point of a knife to extract the seed from each slice into a ramekin or a small bowl.

Relatively un-messy, and I get to eat the tomato slices afterward!

This is also how I do the vast majority of my seeds - slices or halves, a pointy knife, and a bowl to catch the seeds and gel. I can't stand to waste anything, so using a knife to remove the seeds from the locules allows me to use the remaining "meat" for canning. Much of the liquid in tomatoes is concentrated in the seed gel. Removing this makes thicker juice coming out of the food mill and less time cooking it down.

Another plus comes when the fermentation is done. There is less debris in the fermentation jar to rinse off. This means less time processing the seeds from jar to paper plate.

BTW, I use plastic peanut butter and mayonaise jars for the fermentation. And, yes, I put the lids on and I still get the white fungus. The lids allow me to pick one up and swirl it to evenly mix the contents and spread out the developing fungus. It also keeps down the "stinky" part and allows me to set them anywhere without drawing those "dadburned aggravating gnats".

[dice]

You can see pictures of Ted extracting seeds here:
http://t.tatianastomatobase.com:88/w...g_Fermentation

I basically do that, but I skip the strainer step until after the seeds
are fermented, unless I am adding the juice from some common,
less tasty tomato to a batch where I only got a few seeds and very
little juice out of the tomato or tomatoes. I strain the juice that I am
adding from another tomato to avoid mixing the seeds from two
different cultivars together. I am fairly careful with the squeezing
and knife point follow up to not get many chunks of tomato pulp into
the fermenting seeds.

If you have big batches to process from a field, less labor intensive
methods are typically used. I seem to recall that Wi-sunflower puts her
fruits in a bucket and stirs it with a paint stirring implement on a drill
to initially separate seeds from fruit. Another method is to put them
in mesh bags and trample them with feet, like the ancient, traditional
method of crushing grapes to make wine, fermenting them right in the
mesh bags in a container full of the juice from crushing them.