Don’t you wonder what I do with all of those buckets of tomatoes that grace my kitchen floor? Sure you do and today you can find out. You can even play along if you like. Honestly – it is ridiculously easy to make tomato sauce and making something like this from scratch is so satisfying, it is well worth the effort.
My Mom and Grandmother did quite a bit of canning and freezing, so I learned a lot from them and after marrying Larry, who grew up in a 4th generation farming family, I learned even more from his Mom and Grandmother. Out here, putting up vegetables is a fact of life this time of year. I do more freezing than canning these days. It is easier for one thing and I prefer the taste of most things frozen and that definitely goes for tomato sauce. I can also do up a smaller batch of tomatoes, because I am not worrying about filling 8 quart jars to run the canner at the fullest and most efficient capacity.
Not having a garden of your own should not prevent you from giving this a try. Farmer’s Markets and vegetable stands are good sources for buying vegetables in bulk. If they don’t have large quantities on display, you could ask them to sell you a half bushel or even a quarter, which is called a peck. A bushel is about 8 gallons and the pails on my kitchen floor are 5 gallons mostly. I used about 2 and a half gallons of tomatoes for this batch of sauce.
First, wash them of course. You will notice that this is a mixture of types of tomatoes. There are Early Girls, Romas and a lot of Juliet grape tomatoes.
After washing, remove stems and cut into chunks.
Begin filling your pan. Don’t add any water – just lightly mash the first 3 or 4 tomatoes you put in and keep the heat low for about 15 minutes and the tomatoes will give you all the moisture you need to to keep them from sticking. This is an 8 quart pot and I was able to fill it right to the top. I added about 4 teaspoons of salt. Leave the lid on until it comes to a simmer and then remove it so that some of the liquid has a chance to boil away.
Keep stirring every 20 minutes or so and watch that it doesn’t boil too briskly which will give the sauce a sort of bitter flavor. It will cook down – this is after about an hour.
And this is after about 2 hours. All of the tomatoes have a nice soft consistency and in my opinion, it is ready to begin turning into sauce.
You don’t have to do this next step, but it will make running the tomatoes through the food mill easier. Say hello to my little friend – the immersion blender
You aren’t making sauce at this point – just making it easier, by getting things to a more uniform size. And running one 8 quart pan of tomatoes through a food mill is not a big deal. Running through three 8 quart pans of tomatoes is though and that is when this step will really save you some trouble. Just run the blender through the tomatoes for a minute or two, to break them down a bit.
See? Still chunky, but smaller chunky.
Now say hello to my other friend – Mr. Food Mill
You put in the tomatoes and take them for a spin, adding more as the sauce gets extracted. Again – 1 pot of tomatoes = easy. 3 pots of tomatoes = harder. 5 pots of tomatoes = look pitiful and hope Larry unwisely stumbles into the kitchen.
Every so often you empty out the seeds and skin. This goes in the compost around here.
Now that all of the sauce has been rendered out of the ‘maters, you have three choices. You can freeze now – a thinner kind of sauce that will be a good base for soups or stews. You can put it back on the stove and simmer it down more to obtain a thicker sauce. Or you can sorta, kinda cheat, and thicken the sauce with tomato paste. Today I am opting for the 3rd choice. I often leave it thin for soup base, but if I plant to use it for sauce, I always use tomato paste. Cooking it down more on the stove is going to use more gas for one thing. I also am of the opinion that the flavor stays brighter this way. I am going to get more sauce for efforts and it is way easier.
At the end – it looks like this. This is plain sauce with just salt and some pepper – I will decide what flavors to add when I use it this coming winter. I will do up plenty of sauce with onions, peppers, garlic and herbs as the season pregresses, but for this first batch, I kept it simple.
Now, carefully decant into saved yogurt containers, label with the proper vintage and stack in the freezer.
I think 2008 is going to be to very good year.
…Girl, you’re amazing! You’re right up there with Ree I’m telling ya… :o)
…I never gave it a thought to freezing it! It only makes perfect sense… Thank you dlyn!
…Love the step-by-step photos too!
…Blessings… :O)
Even I, who only has a kitchen because it came with the house, can understand and follow your very helpful step by step recipes.
The added bonus of the photos is wonderful.
Thanks for sharing.
Bear((( )))
Prego’s got nothing on you, woman! (Except they are more accessible to me than your freezer.) :)
sara
http://www.gitzengirl.blogspot.com
This looks like good sauce! I made some of my own a while back and there is nothing like fresh sauce!
Yummy!
Yum! I love this time of year when my in-law’s start giving us delicious tomatoes.
P.S. Your pictures are quite impressive! I’m so jealous!
Looks delish!
=D
I love the containers for the extra. If you have a complete set of dishes and they all say Cool-Whip on the side… you might be a redneck. I’m not judging though, my whole life I’ve eaten leftovers out of butter tubs, until Lauren discovered the joys of buying Tupperware-esque containers from Sam’s.
Tomatoes. Hmm. Okay. The food mill looks really cool. I just blanche, peel and seed mine before cooking. Your way looks like a lot more fun. :)
Oh, yum! I’m imagining hot pasta, bread and a tasty glass of wine to go with!
My humble garden just yielded the first two tomatoes this week….I didn’t pick a spot with enough sun!
oh my the food mill I have nightmare of running that sucker for HOURS when mom was putting things up for winter… I was to run the mill as she did 50 million other things… hummm the taste though so yummyyyyy
I can’t wait to start canning tomatoes!
Of course, I said that with strawberries, blueberries, corn and peaches and then I screamed two days into each….
Great instructions. I love home canned/frozen tomato sauce.
That looks decadent! I’ve harvested enough tomatoes to make, oh, maybe a cup of that sauce. Not a good tomato year…
Just bought a food mill – I think I’ll take your advice and go to the farmer’s market and get tomatoes!
Yummers! Tomato sauce, homemade, is awesome!!!!
And I see one of my favs is there, the immersion blender. And the rice mill! You’re mi kind of gal!!
Love your site too!!
Stunning pictures of the process… This looks like a delicious tomato sauce.
I’ve got the tomatoes – now I just wish I had the freezer space! This has got to be amazing!
I just did that myself a few days ago – independently of this blog entry. What I did differently (which was told me by an italian friend):
-I didn’t cut the tomatoes into pieces.
-I cut out the green piece on the top, though
-I added a wee bit of water (100 ml) to the pot so that the tomatoes don’t stick
-I added olive oil, about 3 soup spoons for 3 kg of tomatoes
-I let them boil moderately for four hours.
-There was no need for the mixer, you could run them through the food mill as is after four hours. Some Italians say that four hours is the minimum amount of cooking time.
-Instead of freezing, I put the sauce into washed out pickle jars, sealed them with their snapper mechanism and the obligatory rubber band, and put them into a steamer pot for 20 Minutes. They’ll keep for months, they say.
Since this was my very first try for selfmade tomato sauce, I can’t say if they’ll really be good for months, but the one I opened today for testing was just fine. I guess you could always steam the jars longer, say, 60 or 120 Minutes.
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