It’s cooking….

Spaghetti with fresh sauce is the menu for tonight. Just got the pot on and the first simmering started.

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Looks good.
DT

Was good eating too. Made about 8 cups, so we ate well and have plenty for another meal. No vampires around tonight either. Garden tomatoes, garlic and onion from the garden as well as the herb blend I make from dehydrated herbs I grow in the garden.

yeppers.looks mighty fine…….. bettin the aroma in the house was awefully good too!!!!!!

After simmering until the onion and garlic are transparent, the pulp gets scooped into a coarse colander to drain, then into the bowl of a food processor. It gets pulsed to ten second on puree, then a full minute. After processing the puree is poured into a fine sieve over a bowl and the puree is pushed thru leaving all the seeds and any rougher stuff like a piece of tomato skin or onion skin. When all the processing is done, the puree goes back in the pot and allowed to slowly simmer while the juice in that bowl gets put on heat to a health simmer and allowed to reduce until its a darker red and very little moisture is left. This is added back into the sauce in the pot. A half cup of the sauce in the pot is removed and cooled then a heaping tablespoon of corn starch is beat into it, then its re-added to the pot and blended in thoroughly. This “fixes” the loose water in the sauce. The sauce is tasted for salt, pepper and sweetness and if needed maybe a tablespoon or so of sugar is added should the sauce be real tart. In this batch I added a 1/4 cup of honey, as it’s sweetness is not as stark as when using processed white sugar. The tartness is not something you know about until the sauce has gotten to this stage.

I made this batch using a primarily Roma style tomato call San Marianna or maybe just Marianna. They’re typically larger than Romas. Any tomato can be used to make sauce but most of the standard slicing tomatoes or cherry type have so much water that it’s a battle to cook it out of the sauce. There was maybe three gallons of whole tomatoes in this batch.

The sauce seen in the bowl here has a destination, but other batches having at least two and a half cups left over will get froze in quart zip lock freezer bags with the air pushed out before laying flat in the freezer and freezing until solid. When hard the bag of sauce, bag and all, gets slipped into a quart sized vacuum pouch and vacuum sealed. Done as such the sauce will keep for several years.

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Sounds delicious. I’ll soon be coming on to canning salsa and experience some of the extra liquid problem you described for larger tomatoes. My wife only allows beefsteak tomatoes in the small garden. With salsa it’s not as much of an issue as with sauce.

Here’s a trick I use when making salsa. As it’s cooking down I take a coffee cup and dip out the juice running it threw a noodle stainer keeping the goodies in the salsa. Cuts the cooking time down

The juice I strained off before running the cooked tomato mixture thru the food processor got cooked down in a saute pan and yielded better than a cup of really rick tomato paste that went right back in the sauce while it was doing its final simmer.