Getting Saucy with Tomatoes
Hey! So, do you remember my “Great Green Tomato Experiment”? If not, check out my blog post and read all about my shenanigans with green tomatoes, cardboard boxes, and bananas. I had buckets of green tomatoes that I had to harvest before a hard frost took them. Luckily my little experiment worked because they all ripened. Of course, I couldn’t possibly eat them all before they went bad, so I froze them. Fast forward to this weekend…. I took all those vacuum sealed bad boys out of the freezer and made sauce. Yay!
Truth be told, this is how I always make sauce. In the summer it’s just too hot to cook all day and then the canning on top? Um, no thank you. I’m sure there is an Italian grandmother cringing right now. Sorry to all the Nonna’s out there, but this works for me and I swear, it’s sooooooo much easier. If you’ve got tomatoes that start to feel less than firm, or you’ve got too many, just freeze them. When you have enough, make some sauce!
To freeze the tomatoes, clean them, remove the stems, dry, and arrange on a cookie sheet, single layer, and place in the freezer. Once they’re hard, you can vacuum seal them and store them in the freezer. This will allow them to keep for many months, and when thawed, the juice will stay in the bag. Warning! Be careful when you take the cookie sheet out. Those suckers are like little bowling balls. One wrong move and you’ll lose a toe. OK, maybe you won’t lose a toe, but they hurt like the dickens when they roll off the tray and onto your foot. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Not fun!
When I’m ready to make some sauce, I take out my bags of frozen tomatoes and thaw them. Note: they are mushy when thawed, and the bags will have quite a bit of liquid in them. That’s perfectly OK. One by one, I cut the top off the bags and plop the maters in my Vitamix and puree them. Skins, seeds, and all get liquefied. Be sure to blend long enough to puree the seeds so that you don’t have to bother with straining anything. Who’s got time for that?
As you puree a bag, pour it into your stock pot and continue until all the tomatoes are done. During the puree process, I like to add peeled garlic cloves and fresh herbs that I am too lazy to finely dice. Rosemary for instance can be quickly pulled off the stem and thrown in. Dried herbs can be pureed as well, or you can just add them to the sauce. I do a little of both.
You can add peppers and onion if you like. As for herbs, honestly anything goes. I like to add basil, oregano, thyme, parsley, marjoram, rosemary, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, and a dash of nutmeg. I also throw in dried onion, leeks, and shallots. You can throw in whatever floats your boat. Taste, add, and taste some more. I also like to make a spicy version and add cumin, cayenne, hot smoked paprika, and white pepper. Keep in mind, that tomatoes are pretty acidic, so to tame that you can either puree some carrots and add or a little sugar.
Once you have everything added, heat the sauce on medium until it starts to bubble. Keep the lid off the entire time you cook the sauce. We want to cook off all the water. Once the sauce is up to temp, bring the heat down to a low setting about a 3. You want a gentle simmer. The idea is not to have sauce spitting out all over the place. Simmer until the sauce is reduced to about half or more if you like it thicker. Depending on how much sauce you’re making, this could process could 1-6 hours. As the sauce gets thicker, you may need to turn the heat down further to keep it from spitting and burning.
When the sauce is at your desired thickness. You can move onto canning or freezing. You can also make paste. I took one pot of sauce and made an ice cube tray full of paste for use in recipes. To do this, spread the sauce evenly onto a cookie sheet about a half inch thick. Bake in the oven at around 200 degrees for an hour or two. I check mine at the one-hour mark to see how thick it is and then check every half hour till it’s a good thick paste. See the photo above - Notice the sauce is so thick it stands in peaks when swirled by my scraper? When it’s done to your liking, fill silicone ice cube trays with the paste and freeze. Pop one out whenever you want to jazz up a recipe.
Well folks, there you have it. Easy peasy sauce with all your leftover tomatoes. Never let a harvest go to waste again. You can even do this with store bought tomatoes if they’ve been sitting in the fridge and get a little too soft for salad.
Until next time…
Dream Big, Plant Love, and Grow Where You’re Planted
XOXO - Laurie