Tomato Sauce

Here it is: the long-awaited, much-anticipated, and oft-requested tomato sauce blog. And there is still time to sauce tomatoes this summer! I am in laptop-less land lately, as one child is typically awake till 10 and the other likes to wake up at 5. Not a lot of mommy-laptop time left after that!

As frequent consumers of jars of spaghetti sauce for quick dinners through the winter, we have been wanting to try our hand at our own sauce, using local organic tomatoes, to use through the year. After much discouragement about how hard it is, how time-consuming, how large the ratio of tomato:jar of sauce, we got inspired at a pizza cooking class. The hosts made a quick oven-roasted tomato sauce for the pizzas, during the class, while we watched, and it was fabulous! Their recipe in hand, we set out to do some research, try some recipes, and figure out how to preserve the result.

I will tell you what we settled on as our favorite/easiest recipe, let you in on some tips we learned, and then point you toward the recipes we looked at to come up with our own.

Tomato Sauce Ingredients (Ingredients are per 5 pounds of tomato. Makes 2-3 jars or 3-4 freezer containers.)

tomatoes (see note)
Onion - 1 med, roughly chopped
Garlic - 0-4 cloves (see note)
Anchovy filets- 3 or 4
Basil - handful fresh chopped
Oregano - 2 tsp dried
Red wine - 1/3 cup
olive oil
salt - 2-3 tsp

Special tools

1. To "sauce" the stewed tomatoes, most recipes call for a food mill. We don't have one. We don't even have a food processor. We used a hand blender that we like to use for soups. But any of the above will work.
2. Big pot. My 16 quart pot held about 15 pounds of tomatoes at a time.

Process

1. Prepare the tomatoes (see note on tomatoes)
2. In the smaller pot, caramelize the onion in about 1/4 cup olive oil per onion. Just sort of cook it over medium-low heat for about 30-40 minutes, til it is sweet-smelling. At this point, just dump the onions into the tomato pot.
3. Once the onions have been transferred to the tomatoes, if you were so diligent as to juice your tomatoes, pour the juice and wine into the now-empty onion pot and cook them down to a much smaller volume.
4. In the larger pot, in about 1/2 cup of olive oil, warm the garlic (if using) and anchovy over medium-high heat, then add the tomatoes.
5. "Cook down" the tomaotes, or let them turn into mush.
6. Add onion, basil, oregano, salt, and wine (or wine-tomato juice reduction) to the tomatoes.
7. Use the hand blender, or batch the tomatoes through a food mill or stand blender or food processor, or go crazy with a potato masher, and make those mushy tomatoes look like sauce. We don't mind chunkiness, so we weren't fanatic about this. But you could be.
8. Now, if your tomato sauce looks like pasta sauce, you are done. If it is too juicy, put a spatter screen over the pot and let it cook down. You will need to stir it every 10 minutes or so and adjust the heat to keep it simmering. This could be up to an hour, depending on the juiciness of your tomatoes and the desired thickness of your sauce.
9. Put it away - in your mouth, your freezer, or canned in your pantry (see note).

Notes:

1. Tomatoes. The "right" way to make tomato sauce is with Roma tomatoes that have been blanched, peeled, juiced, and halved. We tried romas and heirlooms. We tried peeled/juiced and straight from the field. And we even tried oven-roasted. Here's the DL:

Tomato Type. Romas are easier to sauce, as they have less juice than heirlooms, but heirlooms have more mad tomato flavor. (More juice = more "cooking down" time.) Also, the heirlooms are a variety of yellow-orange-red colors, so the resulting sauce is....orangey. Roma tomato sauce is a nice, bright, expected red.

Tomato Prep. Blanching and peeling was NOT for us. The unpeeled tomato sauce we ate fresh was fabulous. The test batch we froze and defrosted did have some chewy tomato peels. I don't know what happens to canned tomato peels. Oven-roasting tomatoes offered the most mad flavor of all, and did not add too much time to the whole operation.

Roasting Tomatoes. Basically, we halved the tomatoes, put them in baking pans with hot olive oil and garlic cloves, then roasted at 450 degrees for a total of about 40 minutes. We stirred them every 10 minutes, and drained out the juice that had accumulated, into the simmering pot to reduce. They are done roasting when they start to get a brown crust around the edges. After roasting, just pop them in the pot and you are basically at step #6.

2. Garlic. Garlic tastes really good, especially in the oven-roasted sauce. I read that frozen garlic can end up tasting moldy. And I read that canned garlic can end up a lot stronger than it started. So, if you are freezing, skip the garlic and add it fresh when you re-heat in a few months. If you are canning, go easy on the garlic. If you eat the sauce fresh, use a ton of garlic.

3. Put it away. Tomatoes used to be acidic enough for hot water canning, but have been unnaturally selected for sweetness for enough generations that they are iffy to can, especially with added garlic, onion, etc. So, if you can, you will need to use a pressure cooker or add citric acid or lemon juice to each jar. If you add the citric acid or lemon juice, most recipes recommend adding a tablespoon of sugar to offset the acid taste. Too nervous to can, we chose to freeze. We froze in square freezer containers, although bags or jars would also work. The test batch that we defrosted was delicious and retained its color and texture fabulously.

The Pick Your Own website has some nice instructions for the details of canning tomato sauce.
The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food has a spicy spaghetti sauce recipe with instructions for canning, as well as tomato freezing tips.
In Season has a recipe for Rich Tomato Sauce and instructions for freezing.
National Center for Home Food Preservation tomato canning guidelines.
Our favorite local chefs, John and Caprial Pence, have a tasty tomato sauce recipe on their site.