When you grow your own tomatoes, they taste like tomatoes. Not like the red balls of chemicals that the Dutch try to convince other European nations are the same thing. Tomato sauce is an excellent way of storing your excess tomatoes. A good tomato sauce can be used in pizza making, as the sauce for chilli con carné. How about a tomato sauce with chicken, or a sauce to spice up a vegetable dish? Want to know how I make it? Keep reading…
Pick (or buy) about ten kilos of tomatoes, rinse them, and put them into a large saucepan.Add a little vinegar, a little sugar, salt and plenty of pepper, and a handful of mixed herbs. If you like a spicy tomato sauce, add chilli powder. Heat gently and slash the tomatoes so that they release their juices.After about 45 minutes, the tomato sauce should quite thin with soft tomatoes floating on the top. Now it’s time to use an electric hand mixer to liquidize the remaining tomatoes so that the liquid is fairly homogenous.Leaving the skins on gives the sauce a wonderful colour and saves you a lot of time peeling them before boiling. Allow the mixture to simmer for a couple of hours so that the sauce becomes thicker as the liquid evaporates.Some people sieve the tomato sauce to remove the seeds; I leave them in. Sterilise the jars by putting them into an oven for about 15 minutes – not so hot that the glass cracks, but hot enough to kill any bugs which may be lurking inside. Put the tops in a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Finally decant the sauce into the bottles and screw the tops on firmly.
And that’s it. Not difficult to do and the tomato sauce is yummy and very versatile. Start saving your jars ready for next season. The sauce will keep for at least a year.
P.S. I have recently replaced my copper saucepan with an aluminium one. It’s bigger and also I think the copper reacted with the vinegar so best to use a saucepan that is not made of copper.
