Method: Homemade Tomato Sauce

Frozen tomatoes in pots, seperated by color!

I spent the weekend reducing many of my frozen tomatoes into a plain tomato sauce to be used in place of the canned stuff.  Here’s how to do it!

Ingredients:
Frozen or fresh and ripe tomatoes
Salt
Water

Directions:

1)  In a pot large enough to hold your tomato cache, put about 1/2 inch of hot water.  Add frozen tomatoes and put on a medium heat setting and bring to a boil.  This will take a long, long time.  Shoot for a loud simmer, the steam from the water will help thaw the tomatoes faster.

2)  When tomatoes have been simmering a good long time (this will depend on the size of your pot, how many tomatoes are in it, the weather, the alignment of the planets and the way you hold your mouth when you’re cooking) and begin to look deflated, poke them with a knife to accelerate the breakdown.  Sprinkle with salt (it will help pull out water).

Garden Peach variety tomatoes at the "poke 'em with a knife" stage.

3)  Continue to simmer until the tomatoes look really sad and deflated.  Turn down the heat and start moving them into your food processor.  Run food processor for a minute or so, or until all the skins are broken up and the tomatoes are smoothish.  Return to pot and put back to a simmer.

Garden Peach tomato sauce entering the reduction phase.

4)  From here on out, it’s pretty hands off.  Watch your heat, as your sauce reduces, it will take less and less heat to maintain your simmer.  A fast boil will make a heck of a mess and you risk burning the sauce.  When sauce is finally reduced as much as it seems possible (when the simmer starts to make craters in the sauce, it’s done), kill the heat and let cool enough to put into jars or freezer bags.  I have a vacuum sealer, so mine went into vac packs.

Garden Peach sauce (crater stage) reduced to about 1/4 of its original volume.