Let's Get Saucy...
There is nothing better than a ripe tomato in August. You don’t have to do anything to them. There’s almost too much flavor! And when they are in season, they can be so cheap! Buying pounds and pounds of tomatoes at the farmer’s market is completely feasible! So I obviously bought up all the tomatoes I could carry home.
Desperate to cling on to summer past Labor Day, I decided to use my haul to make my own tomato sauce and freeze it this year. It’s a great way to hack recipes with vibrant summer flavors months from now. I used a great simple recipe from David Tanis' City Kitchen in the New York Times as my starting point to play around with below.
And it’s really simple to make because you really don’t add much more than tomatoes! This week, I’ll walk through how to make the sauce and the couple of recipes I made with it before I froze it. I’ve got a bunch of sauce in the freezer now, so you can expect this to make reappearance once the ground has frosted over.
“Savor Summer Sometime Soon” Tomato Sauce
Makes about 2 ½ cups sauce (enough to fill one mason jar to freeze and still have enough to play around with for a few fresh recipes)
- 5 pounds tomatoes
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 tablespoon tomato paste
- 1 garlic clove, halved
- 1 basil sprig
- 1 bay leaf
*Warning: This first part is messy but deeply satisfying to execute.
We’ll kick this off prepping and pulping the tomatoes. Cut them all in half. Then one by one give each half a good squeeze over the sink to get rid of some of the seeds. Get out a large stock pot. Then grab a good, flat grater (I used a cheese grater) and press the flat side of the tomato half into the grater to grate the flesh into the pot. Keep pressing and moving the tomato across the grater until you just have the skin left in your hand. Do this for all tomatoes.
From here on out this is super easy. Place the pot on the stove over high heat. Add the salt, olive oil, tomato paste, garlic, basil and bay leaf. Stir it up, bring the mixture to a boil and then reduce the heat and bring to a brisk simmer.
Simmer for about 20-25 minutes or until the liquid has reduced by roughly half and you have a nice sauce with medium thickness. Want it thicker? Keep simmering. Want to cheat? Add a little cornstarch, but, honestly, you are making fresh tomato sauce, don’t dilute the flavor! Keep simmering if you need to. Your patience will be rewarded.
Taste the sauce and adjust the salt if needed. Transfer the sauce into a mason jar for storage. You can keep it in the fridge and use it fresh for roughly a week. After that, stash it in the freezer and you can pull it out whenever you want, defrost some and revisit the dog days of summer!