Tomato Sauce

We eat a lot of tomato sauce in this house. It is easy and fast. I make some kind of Italian dish at least once a week. Plus, we started having pizza and movie night every Friday and I use tomato sauce for the pizza as well.

We have started planting enough tomato plants that we could keep ourselves supplied in tomato sauce without buying it from the store. That is usually about 10-12 tomato plants. That means that I make a lot of tomato sauce. So we had to come up with a good method for doing it. I think we have got it down.

I have looked up a lot of recipes for tomato sauce. Most of them are pretty similar. You take off the skins, take out the seeds and reduce the liquid. There are variations on how to remove seeds and skin, and also how to reduce the liquid. Some cut the tomatoes and allow them to drain, others just cook them down.

I am no Italian grandma. In fact I’ve never even been to Italy. I can’t even really say that I am super picky about my tomato sauce. But I wanted a good flavor, and I figure if you leave everything in and just cook out the liquid, not only do you keep all the flavor but there is a rich “carmely-ness” that the tomatoes develop as they cook. So that is the method I went with for reducing the liquid. It takes quite a while, but that part is pretty hands off. Just check and stir it every now and again.

The next thing I had to figure out was how to get the seeds out and the skins off. A lot of recipes tell you to blanch the tomatoes. Which works great, the skins come right off. If you are doing a small batch I recommend this method. But that is a lot of tomatoes to blanch and we were working with around 5 gallons of tomatoes. So it got old really fast. Not to mention that we still had to take the seeds out.

A lot of recipes say to just open the tomato and pull out the whole middle. It’s a quick way to get rid of the seeds and it also reduces the amount of liquid in your sauce. Since the part around the seeds has the most water. Again, this method works really well if you want to make a small batch of tomato sauce. But that isn’t what I needed.

So, here is what we do.

• Roast the tomatoes
• Run them through a food mill to remove skins and seeds
• Add other vegetables for flavor and thickness
• Add spices
• Simmer the sauce until it is as thick as I want it.
• Check the pH before bottling
• Pour into sterilized jars and process for safe shelf storage

Roast ’em

I just cut each tomato in half, and remove anything that looks gross. Because the food mill basically smashes everything through a bunch of holes I take off anything that I don’t want ground in. If there is something that is only on the skin and will be removed with the skin, I just leave it on. I am pretty picky but it still doesn’t take very long since most of my tomatoes are fine.

Then, I load up a cookie sheet and put them in the oven at 400 degrees F for 20-30 minutes. I usually do two trays and swap them top to bottom halfway through.

You don’t have to cook the tomatoes first. In fact, the first year I had this attachment I didn’t. The reason I started cooking them is because I feel like it adds to the flavor, while also removing some of the liquid.

Here is what they looked like after they were roasted. I normally load the cookie sheets as much as I can fit. This was just the last batch. I am just glad I remembered to take a picture. 🙂 If I am in a hurry and run out of space on the cookie sheets I will put the rest of the halved tomatoes into a pot to steam them for a bit before I run them through the food mill. Again, not necessary but it makes me feel better I guess, gets the process going.

Food Mill

A food mill is a kitchen tool that pushes food through small holes. Sending the liquid part through one side, the bigger pieces such as skins and seeds stay on the other side. I grew up using one of these:

Which I mentioned in my post about applesauce as well. It is actually a pretty slick tool. You can kind of see in this picture how you feed the fruit in the top funnel and it goes through that metal part with all the tiny holes. What you can’t see is that there is a spiral that pushes the food against the holes as you turn the crank. The parts you want come out the holes and down the shoot. The parts you don’t want come out the side.

It is very effective but, it is also kind of a pain to use. We always had a hard time keeping it attached to the table. It was really a two person job. One person held it on and turned the crank while the other fed in the fruit. Plus the juice would squirt out the holes and between cracks. It dripped all over and usually made a big mess. That may have just been because the one we had was old or something but, needless to say, I wasn’t really excited about this method.

I got really lucky because my husband was thinking for me. He bought a Kitchen Aid stand mixer for me for Christmas one year, then the next year he bought some attachments for me. It has been wonderful because one of those attachments is a food mill. Similar to the hand crank version except that the Kitchen Aid motor runs the crank. It turns it into a one person, easy, job. In fact, as you can see from the short video below, my three year old can, and does, help me out with this. He isn’t quite coordinated enough to scoop the soft stuff like cooked tomatoes or cooked apples. But my 7 year old can, so, in other words, it’s easy to run. I usually end up doing it by myself anyway and it’s not a bad deal.

https://youtu.be/Bd7WXB8st1Y

You may have been able to see in the video that I had two bowls for catching stuff. One catches the sauce and the other one catches the seeds and skins. My kids like to call this the “poop” (te he he) they can’t keep from giggling when they say it.

Add other veggies: for flavor and thickness

Sometimes I just stick with the pure tomato sauce. But throwing some other vegetables into the mix not only adds to the flavors but it also helps to thicken the sauce. Which means you will end up with more. So I often roast some onions, carrots, peppers and garlic cloves. I will just throw them onto the cookie sheet after the tomatoes are done, or at the same time, depending on how many tomatoes I have. The carrots usually need a little more roasting time so I sometimes put them in the pot to boil with the sauce and fish them out later with a slotted spoon. Then I blend all the veggies up in the blender and throw them in the sauce.

You do have to be careful though because this can mess with the pH of the sauce. If you use a tried and true recipe for canning tomato sauce you don’t really need to worry about pH because the ratios of all the vegetables will have been tested. My problem with recipes is that I always want to just use all the tomatoes I have, and not worry about how many there are.

So to solve my dilemma I bought some pH testing strips on amazon. They are pretty cheap. As long as your sauce is below a pH of 4.6 it is considered safe to can with a water bath, or steam canning method. Tomatoes are pretty acidic, as are most fruits. But if you need a bit more acidity you can add lemon juice. In fact, some recipes I have seen say to add 1 tsp of lemon juice to each jar before filling, which you could do, if you wanted to be on the safe side. Usually my sauce ends up acidic enough on it’s own.

Add spices

I usually add salt, pepper and basil to my sauce, maybe oregano if I have it. But recently I have left out the basil and oregano so that I can use my tomato sauce in dishes that are not Italian but still tomato based. My family doesn’t really like chunks of tomatoes so if a recipe calls for diced tomatoes I usually get a better response from just using plain tomato sauce. Anyway, the point to that tangent is that sometimes it is nice to leave your options open and not narrow your flavor profile too early in the game. But then again, when you know you are going to use the sauce for Italian dishes adding the herbs early can allow the flavors to develop nicely. I have done a batch each way this year.

Reduce liquid

This is where you just pour the sauce into a big pot (or two) and get it to a simmer then just let it simmer until it is the consistency you like. You will figure out what that is. Last year I got impatient with a few of my batches and they were still a bit on the watery side. When I use one of those jars I just try to plan ahead. For some dishes it’s not bad to have a runnier sauce. And I try to be aware that not all my sauce is the same.

If I want to use my sauce for a pizza I pull the jar out about 30 minutes before I am going to put it on the pizza and just simmer it down until it is nice and thick. So, what I am trying to say is just use your best judgement but don’t stress too much about whether you are getting it “right” or not. It’s fine.

Pour into jars and process

While you are waiting for your sauce to thicken you should have plenty of time to sanitize your jars, and wash your lids and rings. I like to do more than I think I will need, just in case I get a little extra and need to stick it in the fridge, or run a second batch.

Then, when the sauce is ready, just ladle it into your jars and process them. You may have noticed that I use pint sized jars. That is because my family of four doesn’t usually use a whole quart of tomato sauce in one meal and I got tired of finding moldy half jars of sauce in my fridge. I struggle with the store bought cans as well, for the same reason, they are just too big. With pint jars I can always just use two if I need to. But they last on the shelf much longer than they do in the fridge. I also feel better about filling up seven pints rather than three quarts. Call me crazy.

After the processing is done and they have cooled. (I usually wait until the next day before I move them to storage.) They just need to be labeled with the year and what’s in them. Then they are good on the shelf for about a year.

I still have a few from last year which is nice because who wants to use the stuff they just put into jars? Not me, that’s for sure. It is way easier for me to use last years stuff.

Hope this helps you with making tomato sauce. Let me know what you think and if you have questions or tips.