{"id":374,"date":"2008-08-26T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-26T12:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/?p=374"},"modified":"2009-04-09T08:11:10","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T12:11:10","slug":"tomato-sauce-with-real-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/?p=374","title":{"rendered":"Tomato Sauce – with real tomatoes!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\"cut2_lg\"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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> grape tomatoes.\"wash\"After washing, remove stems and cut into chunks.\"cut\"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.\"pan\"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.\"1_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.\"2_hour\"You don’t have<\/em> 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<\/a>\"\".\"immersion1\"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<\/em> 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.\"immersion2\"See? Still chunky, but smaller chunky.\"after_immer\"Now say hello to my other friend – Mr. Food Mill<\/a>\"\". Mine is a MUI and it wasn’t cheap, but I use it a lot, so it was worth every penny. This is the same tool you would use to make apple sauce, peach butter, fresh pumpkin for pies, squash for Thanksgiving dinner or any number of other squashed, squished, mashed or otherwise pulverized foods.
\n\"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.\"food_milling\"Every so often you empty out the seeds and skin. This goes in the compost around here.\"compost\"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<\/em> easier.\"paste\"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.\"thickened\"Now, carefully decant into saved yogurt containers, label with the proper vintage and stack in the freezer.\"done\"I think 2008 is going to be to very<\/strong><\/em> good year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,9],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1421,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dlynz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}