A fitting tribute to a super summer growing season, I made a big pot of red sauce today from my tomatoes! It's the first time in years that I've had enough tomatoes to do this. It included a mix of San Marzano Gigante, New Girl, Brandywine and Purple Calabash tomatoes. I added some of my onions and peppers. Also oregano, thyme and chives. We had some of the fresh sauce on pasta tonight and it is fantastic!!!
I will freeze the rest.
I have been picking my tomatoes as soon as they turn a bit red and keeping them in a wooden box that I found at a local wine store. Today I used all of the red tomatoes, then washed and replaced the green ones to continue ripening.
So, every year, I make tomato sauce, which requires the following steps: acquire large amounts of tomatoes, peel the skin off the tomatoes, boil the tomatoes down (adding spices) until it’s sauce, then put the sauce into jars and can. Previously, I’ve blanched the tomatoes and peeled the skin off each one… a very time consuming process.
This year’s innovation
You may recall that earlier this year, I was on the local news modeling for the book Craft Activism. Also on the show was the chef from an Italian restaurant. One of the perks of following a cooking segment is that you get to eat the food cooked during the show!The chef told me that they make all of the sauce for their restaurant. I asked if he had any tips for speedy-sauce making, and he told me that they use a food mill. I had never heard of such a thing… but it’s changed my sauce-making life!
Food mills magically remove the skin and peels from the tomatoes, and leave behind a nice, smooth sauce. What an invention!
So this year… I got a food mill! What a great investment! It wasn’t very expensive and it really sped up the process!
Making the sauce
Warning: it’s messy… but pretty fun, too! My two bushels of tomatoes (about 50 lbs) made 7 quarts of sauce. This is less than my average crop, partially because I threw in some non-sauce tomatoes.Step 1: get tomatoes
If you have a local farmer’s market, then that’s the place you’ll want to go to get your tomatoes. Ask if they have ‘seconds’, which is code for ‘tomatoes with a bump or bruise’. They’re too damaged to be sold at full price, but they’re great for sauce!I bought 2 bushels. Ideally, you want ‘sauce’ tomatoes (a variety with more fleshy-bits on the inside), but some of the ones I got this year were heirlooms, and they worked just fine. Non-sauce varieties taste just as yummy, they just might need some extra boiling time (when making the sauce) because of their extra water content.
Step 2: Cut out icky parts and run through food mill
Cut out any severely bruised or moldy/icky parts of the tomato… you don’t want that in your sauce! Then, cut the tomatoes into quarters (or whatever size you need to so that they fit through your mill), and start cranking!Step 3: make sauce
So, the next thing you do is take all that sauce that’s been pouring out of the sauce chute and put it in a pot on your stove… or, if you have as many tomatoes as me, a few pots:Add in whatever you think would be yummy. I added (pre-sauteed) garlic and onions, plus some basil, oregano and salt.
Then, just keep cooking until it’s the consistency of sauce you buy in the store!
