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This is my pantry, and as you can see it has only just begun to be filled with tomato sauce. By October, I will have more than five gallons of homemade sauce, plus tomato paste and lots of dried tomatoes in oil. Just as I’ve hunted or fished for most of our meat in the past several years, I also have put up nearly all our tomato products.
It is a good feeling, as I can control the processes needed to turn fresh tomatoes into something more magical. I’ve written about drying tomatoes recently, and I will get to tomato paste, but my mainstay is the common tomato sauce. Only making tomato sauce is not so common.
If I asked every one of you reading this how you make your own tomato sauce I would get answers ranging from “open a jar” to long-simmered sauces to sauces that absolutely require this variety of tomato or that one, etc etc. And I am talking here about base sauces, not finished ones with herbs and oil and wine. This is about making a base tomato sauce that will ultimately find its way into any sort of dish, from Chinese cuisine to Italian to Moroccan or Mexican.
I have made a small lake of tomato sauce over the years and have come up with a few tips, pointers, and variations on the basic tomato sauce I find works well for me. I typically make several types of sauce each year, and have never stopped tinkering. This year I messed around with a fermented tomato sauce:
Yep. I fermented tomatoes, ate them and suffered no ill effects. Why on God’s Green Acre would I even think to do this? I actually saw a recipe for something like this in a very cool book called Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, which is a collection of recipes from Europe that focus on the old ways of keeping food through the winter.
Basically you smash tomatoes, put them in a clean crock, cover to keep the bugs out, and stir twice a day. Tomatoes have lots of sugar in them, and that sugar turns to alcohol in a day or three. That’s natural fermentation fizzing in the picture above. Pretty wild, eh?
Once the fizzing calms down in 4-6 days, you have to watch for the white mold, which is a pencillin mold in my house (I’ve inoculated my house, it seems, with store-bought versions of this mold that I use to help preserve my charcuterie). As soon as this mold appears, you scrape it off and bottle the sauce, according to the recipe.
I had high hopes for this, I really did. But even I was a little skeeved at fermented tomato wine with a thin layer of white mold on it. Intellectually I knew nothing bad would happen, but we are hard-wired not to like stinky moldy things, unless they are cheese. And even then.
I tasted the sauce and ZING! I got a hit of alcohol and acid that cleared my nostrils. Not a sauce to give to children. I must admit I did not really like it. But nor did I hate it, so I boiled off the sauce with some salt until it was thick enough to jar; the original recipe is uncooked. It’ll be fine as a base to something, but fermented tomato sauce was not what I’d hoped. Oh well.
My normal, baseline tomato sauces go two ways: One with paste tomatoes, and one with heirloom or hybrid eating tomatoes. Most common is with paste tomatoes, which I’ll buy 10 pounds at a shot at the farmer’s market. Some guidelines:
- Let all tomatoes, but especially paste tomatoes, ripen in your kitchen for several days after you buy them. Paste tomatoes take forever to really ripen, even long after they look nice and red. You want them just this side of rotten. Why? Makes a sweeter, richer sauce.
- Chop your tomatoes roughly and toss into the pot you are going to cook them in. I find that 4-5 pounds of tomatoes will get you a half-gallon of sauce, so you need a big pot.
- Add 1-2 tablespoons of salt and mix it in with your hands. Let this stand for 30 minutes before cooking. I’ll tell you why in a bit.
- After the tomatoes have marinated in the salt, put the pot over medium-high heat and cook, stirring often, for no more than 10 minutes. It’s done when you can see liquid up to the level of the tomatoes when they are all leveled out in the pot. Do not overcook.
- Push the whole lot through a food mill with the medium (or fine, up to you) sieve setting. Yes, you need to do this, or find some other way to strain out the skins and seeds.
A word on milling. If you don’t already have one, every person interested in canning really, really ought to own a food mill.
And the reason for the salt marinade is to make the tomatoes soft enough to mill even after such a short cooking time. A longer-cooked sauce has an entirely different flavor; that one comes next.
Incidentally, milling is one of those instances where you can vividly witness the truism that the difference between good and great is that final 5 percent. You want to stop milling because your arm is tired, but there is still some pulp left in the mill. Yet if you fail to mill out that final 5 percent, your sauce will be overly watery — tomatoes do not give up their last bit of goodness willingly. Think of it as a workout, and keep cranking that handle.
Only then is it time to jar your sauces. I use quart Mason jars, and I process them 12-15 minutes in boiling water.
I also make sauces from regular tomatoes, and these are long-cooked sauces. You go through the same process as for paste tomatoes, only you will find heirlooms and table varieties extremely watery in comparison. When you mill them you must use the fine sieve on the mill or risk getting a seedy sauce, which may keep you regular, but does not look so nice on the plate.
After milling, I cook these sauces down, sometimes for hours, until they are thick enough to jar. I also add a leaf or two from the tomato plant for extra tomato flavor; don’t worry, they are not terribly poisonous, despite what people say. For a good discussion on this trick, read Chef Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand
This makes a good sauce. But if you have the time, there is another way to make an even better one. The king of all tomato sauces is this: Roasted Single Variety Tomato Jams. You want tomato flavor? You want savory umami-tastic, lick-the-bowl goodness? Make this sauce.
I found these giant Mr. Stripey tomatoes at the farmer’s market, and dropped $15 on seven pounds of them to make this sauce. Yeah, it’s expensive, but these sauces — unlike the other ones — are not necessarily base sauces. They can stand on their own as a finished sauce.
I did everything I normally do for a sauce, but after I milled it, I put it into a wide casserole in the oven. I set the oven to 225 degrees and walked away.
Every few hours I stirred it, but that’s really all you need to do to make this sauce. How long will it take? Hard to say. Different varieties have different water contents. These took seven hours. I did a batch with Cherokee Purple tomatoes from my garden that took nine hours.
I plan to make a series of these single-variety sauces and serve them side by side somehow. Definitely want to do Green Zebra, and maybe Black Krim. And the Brandywines from my garden will get their turn in the slow oven, too. Best of all, cooking the tomatoes this way — slowly, below a boil — preserves the fresh tomato flavor pretty well, and concentrates it so much that seven pounds of tomatoes becomes a quart or less of sauce.
I know there are many other ways to make tomato sauces. My Italian neighbors will boil tomatoes in huge vats outside to make the — I shit you not — 100 gallons of sauce they use every year. They add basil, salt, sugar and oil to their sauce before canning. I know Greeks who toss a cinnamon stick into the simmering tomatoes.
But I can tell you that there has been no other tomato sauce as good as these slow-roasted sauces, which have only salt added to them. Pure, sweet, savory and beautiful to look at, I’ve never been able to top it. It makes the time laboring in the hot kitchen all worth it.
This is a great instruction manual and peek into your kitchen. I have to admit I’ve never heard of what you call a paste tomato. What does it look like? Does it go by any other names?
The slow roasted sauce sounds very interesting. I’ve made a variation on top of the stove, slowly cooking romas down at barely a simmer, almost to a paste. Very sweet, and rich, but very easy to burn. Slow roasting may by my next project. All sorts of fabulous tomatoes are showing up at our local farmers markets right now, so I’m thinking that an heirloom sauce might be making an appearance next week.
As for straining, I also have an old fashioned food mill, which works really beautifully. I recently got the strainer attachment for my Kitchen Aid, but I haven’t tried it on tomatoes yet. I’m not sure it will get that last but of pulp out, like the food mill, but I’ll give it a try.
I tried cooking down my Brandywine sauce to pizza sauce in the crockpots this year. Decent enough concept, but it didn’t work so well with having to go to work. What was fine at lunchtime was burnt-tasting after work. Still, I may revisit this on a weekend. I’ll try the oven too. My basic pizza sauce looks very similarly textured to your tomato jam, by the way, and is really sweet.
Simple enough, even an Albert can do it!
Thanks,
Albert
Real Men Hunt
Your pantry already looks beautiful. I really like your idea about single varietal sauces. It would make for a fun tasting party in the dead of winter.
The book on preserving w/out freezing/canning was an interesting read indeed. And you may have just resolved my dilemma with processing tomatoes – the food mill to remove skins is infinitely sexier than skinning in hot water prior. I must try it.
Heather: A paste tomato is just another name for a Roma or San Marzano. It is a drier, meatier tomato used in processing. You can find them in any supermarket.
Tina: Oven is the way to go. And at 225 degrees, it will not heat up the whole house.
Sigh. It’s been so cold, and rainy (?!) in Montana this summer that I’ve only just gotten my first couple of Galina yellow cherry tomatoes. With luck, and plastic, perhaps by the end of September I’ll have enough to can sauce … I’ve just run out of my own, and while the Pomi sauce is good, it’s not mine.
On about my 8th gallon of sauce and getting to that ‘sick of it’ state. Lately I’ve been filling a roasting pan with Romas with a few jalapenos and throwing under the broiler until charred. Then through the mill and simmered a bit before going into the jars. Might take it down to a jam next time ..sounds good.
nothing to do with tomato sauce, but Holly did a great job on the article in the Bee about your fishing trip
I cooked down 5 lbs of tomatoes from our garden into abou 3 cups of sauce last night. Very tasty! I just started canning this year; so far it’s just been pickles. You mentioned your processing time was ~15 minutes. A book I have from the good people at the Ball company has a recipe for tomato sauce they process for 35-40 minutes, including a tbsp of lemon juice (presumably to lower the acidity). I followed your directions; will I die of botulism?
Ben: The people at Ball are playing it very safe. I will occasionally toss in a tablespoon of lemon juice if I think my tomatoes aren’t very acidic (yellow ones are typically this way), but Roma or paste tomatoes have always been plenty acidic in my experience. No need for extra lemon juice.
As for processing for 40 minutes, well… wow. Can’t possibly imagine why tomato sauce would need that much time. I’ve done between 10-20 minutes for a decade and have never had a problem.
The Ball people try and convince you that if you use any method but theirs you will die. Although it is a safe place for a beginer to start.
The sauce my wife made yesterday will be pressure canned for 30 minutes the pint, but it includes onions, carrots, celry and chicken stock. 24 lbs of tomatoes with 8 quarts of stock. Probably about 4 pound s each of the other vegetables. I have slightly more than 5 gallons to put up in pints.
As soon as you start adding non-acidic vegetables, ground meat or meat stocks to the sauce, you must go to pressure canning.
[...] I kick myself every year for failing to do so, so this is the year. I am planning on following Hank Shaw’s instructions for making and bottling the stuff. I figure 8# should give me 3 quart sized jars, a good [...]
I absolutely cannot wait to hear how the single variety tomato sauces stand-up in side-by-side comparisons, especially if you’re cooking them all down to the same consistency. How much flavor difference will there be? I seriously cannot wait to hear…. Brilliant idea!
I made a second batch this weekend. I cooked about 12 lbs of tomatoes into two quarts of sauce. The salt seems a bit much at two tablespoons for two quarts. Do you cut your sauce when you use it?
Molly: I am still in the middle of doing this, but I can tell you there is a noticable color and flavor difference between the varieties. I’ve done Mr. Stripey, Brandywine and Cherokee Purple so far.
Ben: 2 tablespoons is on the salty side, but it will help with preservation. I am pretty sure you can get away with just one tablespoon, though, especially if your tomatoes are acidic (Romas, San Marzanos are especially so).
i was going to try and can my tomato soup base this year without peeling the tomatoes. put them in my vita mixer and pulverize them! do you think the skins will give me a bitter taste? why do we peel them?? thanks! enjoyed your site.
Shonda: Nope, you need to peel the skins. Sorry. They are all fiber and don’t digest at all, nor do they look good in your sauce. You will notice, as will your guests. Peeling is easy with a food mill, or you can blanch and peel them by hand, which takes more time.
Awesome recipe, the first of yours I’ve tried. So many more to come as deer season has just kicked off in Virginia (early bow). The food mill is a must. I’m so picky about how tomatoes taste, that I won’t even purchase them at any other time than during the summer. The only problem is now I have to plant a lot more next year. Such a bad problem to have.
Thanks and keep keep writing!!!!!
Just wondering if you ended up trying green zebras, and if so, how long they took to cook down, and how the sauce turned out! Green zebras are my favorite variety and I thought they’d make a fun, colorful sauce, so I bought a bunch yesterday at the farmers’ market. But to my surprise, I can’t find any other green zebra sauce recipes online! Your jam method definitely seems like a great way to highlight the color and flavor. Thanks!
[...] weekend farmer’s markets by noon anymore) and made a tomato jam. The recipe was inspired by this post from Hunter Angler, probably my favorite food blog (I’m not alone, Hank is a James Beard [...]
My grandmother used to make tomato sauce in the same way as you. Thank you for reminding me!
Lovely, just lovely! I’m going to try slow-roasting some toms this year, as well as smoking some, just to see what happens.
I’m a ketchup maker, and I’ve had very good luck with using crock pots. I put the tomatoes in whole and let it cook for 24 hours. About 2/3 of the way through I use an immersion blender and blend up the whole batch. I’ve found that the skins and seeds blend down to almost nothing, and the texture is actually quite pleasant.
I’ve seen those crazy stripey tomatoes at the market here in London. Have always been curious.
Not your grandma’s recipe! Perfect tomato sauce with minimal effort and maximum fun: http://bit.ly/pg65rd
Cool. I initially went on to google to just find out if commercially-produced tomato sauces were made of rotten tomatoes :laugh: but… I guess I should be worrying instead about all the preservatives and chemicals that are in there
I made tomatoe sauce and bottled it. After a month mold started to grow on the top of the sauce. It was still sealed. What went wrong? Anyone had this happen?