Saturday 24 September 2011

Making tomato sauce is easy

Right now I have lots of tomatoes ripe and ready to use, with lots more coming on too. More than we can eat in fact, so we have been making some of them into sauce to freeze for later use. Some people might think that this is difficult, but I disagree. This is how I do mine...

Start with nice tasty home-grown tomatoes - as many as you think will fit into your biggest saucepan.


Peel and chop a couple of onions, and soften them a bit in some vegetable oil in your big saucepan, using a gentle heat.

Meanwhile, roughly chop your tomatoes. I used a mixture of red, yellow and green ones.


When the onions are soft, but not browned, add the chopped tomatoes to the pan, along with any flavourings you want to use (I added a couple of springs of fresh Oregano and one red chilli).


Simmer gently for about an hour and a half, by which time the tomatoes should have completely broken down to a pulp. Allow the pulp to cool a bit, then pass it through a "mouli-legumes" if you have one, or a coarse sieve if you don't. This will leave you with a quantity of juice. Rinse out your pan and put the juice back into it. Simmer again uncovered for about another hour and a half, or until the juice has reduced by about a half - this concentrates the flavour and gives the sauce a nice "gloopy" texture.


When the sauce is thick enough for you (this is a matter of personal preference), take it off the heat and allow it to cool before decanting it into suitable containers. Mine was destined for the freezer, so it went into a couple of plastic boxes.


Since I made my sauce with a mixture of different coloured tomatoes, it came out a sort of deep golden colour. I think this is quite attractive, but if you don't like it that way, you could always add a bit of tomato puree to make it redder.

So you see, making tomato sauce really is easy. It takes a long time, but most of that time you don't have to do anything, just let it simmer. And believe me, the taste of home-made tomato sauce is incredibly good!

11 comments:

  1. Hi Marc !!! We do the same job. And yes it is so easy and goooooooooood !!!!!

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  2. Beautiful crop of tomatoes and your sauce looks yummy without a bunch of hard work! And won't it be nice to just pop it out of the freezer when needed!

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  3. We've done something similar with our tomatoes

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  4. That is a very tasty sauce. It looks great to have some rich tomato flavor during the off season.

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  5. Made my very first homegrown tomato sauce the other week. What a great feeling to have something that will be so yummy waiting for you in the wet and chilly winter months :)

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  6. I'm much lazier than you Mark, I roast my tomatoes with garlic and a little olive oil, and then blitz them in the food processor. I never bother sieving since I rather like the bits and pieces. Makes a delicious pizza topping and a lovely addition to a bolognese or chilli.

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  7. We do our sauce in much the same manner as yours but instead of freezing it we (me & my mum)bottle it. Basically you get the sauce to the stage at which you freeze yours then put it in stubbies(375 -500ml beer bottles) cap them (with beer caps - dad does home brew so the device is on hand) and then using my biggest stock pot I stand the bottles in the pot add water to pretty much submerge them and then bring the whole thing to the boil & boil for about 30 mins. We have a very small freezer so this works well for us.

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  8. Very nicely done Mark. I love the color of your sauce.

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  9. Excellent. I love it with some basil leaves added.

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  10. I have frozen all my surplus tomatoes whole until I am in the mood for sauce-making - trouble is I have so many in the freezer I haven't room for anything else - so sauce-making here we come.

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