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Purple Glazer |
We love garden-fresh tomatoes. In fact, we only eat fresh tomatoes when we pick them out of our own garden--everything else is a pale imitation of a tomato that only makes you feel sad for having eaten it. That makes the tomatoes we put up every summer extra special. We make lots of plain tomato sauce to be morphed into chili or stew or Indian food or whatever we need it to be. We also make lots of pasta sauce and pizza sauce. Homemade pizza sauce is one of our favorite things to pull out of the pantry in the dead of winter. The bright, tomato-y sauce with bits of fresh basil tastes like summer, and makes an amazing pizza.
Pizza and pasta sauce are easy--they're both made exactly the same way, but with slightly different seasonings. You can make gigantic batches like I do, or just use a few pounds of tomatoes and just make a pint or two. You can can your sauce in a boiling-water canner, or freeze it, or simply use it within a couple of days. And you can customize your sauce to your personal tastes. Don't like basil? Leave it out. Love it spicy? Add lots of red pepper flakes. You get the idea. One warning--this is an all day process. Don't plan to leave your house on the day you're making tomato sauce.
First, plant your tomatoes. I know you've all done your planting by now, but it's never too early to plan your harvest for next year. If you're doing a lot of sauce making, you want a mix of paste tomatoes and eating tomatoes. I usually try for a mix of at least 50% San Marzano paste tomatoes and 50% "other" varieties. The "other" part changes year by year for us, depending on what worked and didn't in previous years. We plant the tomatoes we want to eat raw, such as Brandywine Pink, Cherokee Purple, Paul Robeson, Big Beef, New Girl, and others. We also plant 3-4 cherry tomato plants, because we all love to eat them straight off the vine. This year, we planted Sun Gold (my favorite) and Sun Peach (our kids' new favorite). Cherry tomatoes can be used for sauce, but only if you process them with a machine (more on that in a minute).
Next, harvest the tomatoes. Ideally, you want to process your harvest the same day you pick it, so I usually go out very early in the morning to harvest and hope to be processing tomatoes by 10am or so. If something happens, you can usually hold your tomatoes overnight. Put them in your garage or basement or somewhere not your kitchen--there will be fruit flies. Don't put them in any space that is cooler than 50 degrees F. Cold kills the texture and destroys the flavor of tomatoes. One hint I have, is to make sure that whatever you put your harvested tomatoes in doesn't get too heavy--the tomatoes on the bottom will get squashed, and you'll lose part of your harvest.
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About 60lbs of tomatoes. The bottom ones were squished and I should take my own advice. |
The Victorio Strainer is simply amazing. The only prep work you have to do is make the tomato fit in the hole. That means cutting large tomatoes in pieces, but smaller tomatoes like cherry tomatoes and San Marzanos can simply be dropped in whole. Even though San Marzanos are my favorite paste tomato, I wouldn't plant them if I didn't have a strainer. They are just too small to peel and seed by hand. And I'd never try to process cherry tomatoes without a strainer--can you imagine peeling all those?!?
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Easy peasy. |
You can even run the seeds and skins back through the machine a second time to get the maximum amount of goodness out of them. There is very little waste--see that pink bowl in the photo? I had about 3/4 of that bowl of waste from 60 pounds of tomatoes.
Once you've processed all your tomatoes, either by skinning and seeding and squishing by hand or by running them through a strainer, it's time to cook them down. Fill a pot with your puree and set it to simmer.
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One 20 quart pot and one eight quart pot. I had to stop processing tomatoes because I ran out of pots to put them in. |
Pizza Sauce
- ground fennel seed (not optional)
- oregano
- black pepper
- salt
- crushed red pepper
- crushed garlic cloves
- sauteed minced onion or onion powder
Pasta Sauce
- crushed garlic
- oregano
- thyme
- salt
- pepper
- crushed red pepper flakes (if you like spicy sauce)
Either eat it immediately, or let the sauce cool and pack into freezer containers and freeze, or process in a boiling water canner. Because of the added ingredients and how thick it is, the sauce must be processed for a relatively long time. Process pints for 35 minutes and quarts for 40 minutes. Enjoy!