Tomato Sauce Marathon

I men­tioned in one of my posts last week, that I had three boxes of organic toma­toes, Early Girl, that I pur­chased at the Great Basin Food Coop. On Fri­day, I got busy mak­ing tomato sauce for freez­ing. I used recipes in a arti­cle by Georgeanne Bren­nan that were in her arti­cle, “From Vine to Freezer — Tomato Sauce for All Year,” which appeared in the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle last July. I decide to take on all three recipes, Basic Tomato Sauce, Roasted Roma Sauce, and Roasted Heir­loom Tomato Sauce.

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I began with the first one, which I cooked last week, with toma­toes from our gar­den. I sliced about twenty pounds of Early Girls, which filled the six­teen quart stock pot that Vicki gave me for my birth­day. They cooked on medium for about two hours, then I ran them through the food mill.

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Then I tack­led the roasted roma sauce, which used my entire twenty-pound box of romas. They were sliced, then baked with olives, capers, mar­jo­ram and anchovies—the secret ingre­di­ent. After bak­ing in the oven for about 2 1/2 hours, I pureed the sauce in the food proces­sor, leav­ing it slightly chunky. The result was a piquant sauce that will make the per­fect base for put­tanesca sauce.
Roasted heir­looms with the next chal­lenge, Chero­kee Black and Brandy­wine toma­toes, oven roasted with olives, fresh basil, spices, bal­samic vine­gar, then sim­mered with white wine. This was also run through the food mill, yield­ing a dark rich sauce that will be superb with pasta, fish, or roasted vegetables.

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I did most of this in one day, the kitchen was roast­ing, prob­a­bly 100 degrees and floor was a mess and there seemed to be tomato residue every­where. Still, the results were fab­u­lous, I’ve put 60+ twelve-ounce bags of sauce in the freezer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Recipes, cooking, freezing, tomatoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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