Ball freshTECH HarvestPro Sauce and Salsa Maker Gray

I hemmed and hawed about spending the money for this appliance, but after using it for the season I can tell you it was worth every penny. The only thing I wish was a bit different is the holes on the strainers. The large one the holes will allow tomato seeds through and the small one could be a bit bigger. I use the smaller one for tomatoes sauce (I didn't want seeds) and the job could be a bit quicker if the holes were a tad bigger. I also found if you don't blanch the tomatoes (for easy skin removal) the auger tends to get clogged. All in all it is a great unit for making tomato sauce and I would recommend it.

Out of 7 boxes of tomatoes (25 lbs each), we ended up with two dozen quarts of tomato juice from peelings alone that would have gone to waste.. I had blanched the tomatoes, and then took the peeling off of them and put them aside, using the whole tomatoes for the stewed tomatoes I canned and four tomato ketchup I made. After I was after I finished canning the main products, I went back and got the feelings I had saved in Ziploc bags from the refrigerator and process them through the ball sauce maker as I said earlier from this endeavor we got two extra dozen quart jars of just tomato juice. I wish I had bought this two years ago when I started canning. Definitely a money saver! It is easy to clean and easy to use.

Before you buy CHECK where you are going to get your replacement parts. Photo of broken parts attached.In 2016, I had a one of the screens and the frame to hold it get dented by a piece of fruit that was harder than my helping person thought when they fed it through. So I needed to replace those two pieces. This could easily happen to anyone. Well I had a heck of a time -- the cost of the parts was cheap enough, but the gnomes at Ball appeared to be unable to find the small town I live in (Toronto, population 5 million) on a map for shipping, so in the end I got a friend in Chicago to order it for me.Things appear to have changed, as I see on Ball's web site (2018) that Ball now refers people to Walmart.com for the purchase of anything from Ball, including the replacement parts. So I checked for some replacement parts for this machine out of curiosity. I gave up searching Walmart's site after 3 minutes. I can see the machine there, but I cannot see replacement parts there.The machine is great, I would probably buy it again, BUT make sure you know where you are going to get your replacement parts from before ordering!

I was very please after using my food mill. You need to read all safety instructions and instructions on use before using. I heated my tomatoes well and let them cool for 1/2 an hour then ran them through the food mill with skins on them and it worked like a dream even ran them through twice to get all the goods out of them. I love it. Tomatoes are the only food I've used so far but if you do what the instructions say you shouldn't have any trouble. Washing i took all things apart put them in warm soapy water, washed carefully and rinse well and used the brush to clean the grinder cone and it cleaned it well, then i dried with a soft dish towel and let air dry thoroughly before putting back in the box for storage until the next time.

I processed a lot of raw quartered tomatoes the first day this machine arrived. I did not read the user guide and jumped right in straining them as fast as I could. It, in my opinion worked well. It did a really good job separating the seeds, skins from the tomato puree that I was after. As I was cleaning up and drying the parts to this machine, I read that the tomatoes should be lightly cooked prior to running them through. Not sure that I will ever do it that way. My tomatoes were fully ripe, that is why I was in a hurry to process them... And the Ball sauce maker handled it nicely.

The media could not be loaded. This mill stores so nicely. Easy to assemble. Easy to use. It has an auto stop in case of food jamming. Nice cord garage. No hand cranking, no mess pouring out of a hand crank handle. No clamping to countertops. It is stable and takes care of food quickly and cleanly.

WOW! What a pleasure it was to use this machine. I have had a manual crank juicer for years and wanted to get a motorized one so I chose this Ball unit. I could not be happier. The quality of the machine is fantastic especially for the price. It took less than 15 minutes to obtain 12 quarts of sauce. Very easy to operate and cleanup was just as easy. The reversing mode is helpful to remove a little clog. The only thing I would caution users is to not try to run celery thru it. We made a vegetable juice and the cooked peppers, onions and parsley went thru fine. The celery has too much fiber and clogs the waste discharge. The machine is not intended to run this produce so not a fault of the machine. If you are planning to can tomato products this is a must buy.

We process tomatoes every September into fresh sauce for the year. Before this machine, we washed, slit the skin, blanched, shocked, peeled, cored and de seeded every tomato by hand, then blended, cooked, jarred and pressure canned the resulting sauce. Two solid days of work for two people in a hot kitchen. This year we spent far less time, just removing the core, slicing in half, roasting (another innovation) and then running the halved tomatoes through the finer of the two strainers, resulting in a skinless and seedless, velvety sauce, ready for jars. The work of two days compressed into four hours of activity. My experience is that we got fewer jars of sauce (16 quarts from 100 lbs) and that could be due to straining the thin liquid after roasting. But the sauce itself is richer. I would seriously consider another 100 lbs of tomatoes, it was that easy.