At last, tomato season is in full swing. With each trip to the garden, I surrender more counter space to delicious red globes and pear-shaped Romas that have my mind stuck on the sweet acidity of summer's finest gift.
But I know it won't last. Tomatoes are a cruel treat. In winter you conspire to rig the perfect support structure. In spring you amend your soil to make it just right. As jeans are tucked away and shorts brought, you plant young vines. You battle with pests to make sure you'll be rewarded. You wait and wait for the green to turn red, and then, suddenly, you're inundated! There's no way you can eat them all. Then, just as they start to spoil, uneaten on your counter, they are gone.
Turning some of your tomatoes into sauce is one way to ensure that you can keep some of that summer taste long after summer has become a memory. Sauce is great because it freezes well and reheats quickly. It can be used in a variety of fall dishes from quick pastas to chili to pizza. And it's 100-percent personalized, which you can't get out of any store sauce.
But to make the best tomato sauce out of homegrown tomatoes there are some things you need to know.
First, tomato selection does matter. Chopping up a bunch of beefsteaks and expecting a marinara is likely to leave you deflated and hungry. The fact is that tomato seeds are a wickedly bitter thing. So varieties with lots of seeds, your typical BLT tomatoes, don't typically make the best sauce. I try to grow at least four Roma plants each year, strictly for making sauce. If you only have big hybrids, you can still make sauce, but do you best to de-seed them before cooking them down. You can add some sugar to your sauce to help counter act the bitterness.
To make a good sauce, you'll also want to skin your tomatoes. At first blush this can seem a daunting task. Shoot, I don't like pealing peaches for cobbler. But there is a time-tested trick to getting those skins right off. Boil some water, drop your tomatoes in for a few moments. Wait for the skin to split, remove, and drop into a bowl of ice water. Do not over-boil your tomatoes, just leave them cooking long enough for the skin to split. After they have cooled, the skin should slip right off.
Set aside a fair amount of time for making your sauce. Homegrown tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, will have a much higher water content. This means they may need several hours to cook down to a consistency you'd think of as sauce, but give it time, and a nice even medium temperature, and you will be rewarded. You can cheat and add some tomato paste, but trust me, getting a sauce that is all your tomatoes is totally worth it.
I don't like to put too much extra into any sauces that I'll be freezing. I'll use a little garlic and a little onion, perhaps a bay leaf, a shake of garlic powder, and some salt. That's about it. If you want to add more, go right ahead. I prefer to keep mine simple which allows for more uses down the road.
Oh, and one more thing, if you are going to be using fresh herbs -- since they too are their height in the summer garden -- do not add them until very late in the cooking process. Giving chopped herbs five minutes is more than enough time. The oils in fresh herbs will be lost very quickly in a simmering sauce, and you don't want to loose those flavors.
Until next time, be well. I'm off to make a BLT!
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