It’s not just that I grow everything I can find; I’m also a prolific preserver, canner, and fermenter. I take my summer harvest seriously and hate having to buy fruit and vegetables from the grocery store between summer and February. But I’m always looking for ways to make the process easier. I’ve tried it all, from freeze-drying to dehydrating to preserving in water, and while I believe in preserving food, you’re going to have to eat it eventually, so preserving its flavor is just as important. While there are plenty of ways to preserve your summer veggies, here are my top picks for how to do it—and why.

Yes, peeling tomatoes is a drag, but freezing tomatoes to avoid peeling them is a bad idea. The whole point of preserving tomatoes is to ensure that you have delicious, home-grown tomatoes to work with over the winter, and freezing them changes the texture in an unpleasant way. Worse, it changes the flavor, making them mealy and not sweet enough. Even when I throw tomatoes into soups, stews, or sauces, I worked hard to grow those tomatoes and I want them to be as flavorful as possible. There are ways to make storing tomatoes easier and skip the painful peeling process, and I have two of them.

First, don’t peel them at all: cut them in half, put them in a large soup pot, and mash enough with your hands to cover all the tomatoes with tomato juice. Simmer the tomatoes for four to five hours. Let them cool, then run the mixture through a food mill. A food mill takes fifteen minutes per 40 pounds of tomatoes, and you end up with a beautiful passata, which you can can. Passata is a traditional Italian pureed, strained tomato sauce, but it has no other ingredients. You can use it almost any way you would peeled, whole tomatoes. A second method is to halve the tomatoes, place them cut-side down on a baking sheet, and roast them until a black spot appears in the center of each tomato skin. Remove the sheet and immediately pluck off the skin with tongs. You can then continue canning them as peeled tomatoes.

If you are going to freeze tomatoes (which I do not recommend), cook the tomatoes first instead of freezing whole, raw tomatoes. Cooking the tomatoes preserves the flavor, color, texture, and vitamins in the vegetable and removes almost all bacteria. Make sauce or paste and put it in freezer bags or vacuum bags, removing as much air as possible.