Homemade Tomato Sauce

I love making amazing dishes from stuff I grow myself.  Nothing tastes as good as fresh veggies straight from the hot summer sunshine, veggies that you nurtured from small plants. That's the way to eat - the less time and distance between you and your ingredients, the better the food. The sense of satisfaction I get from cooking from my own garden is immeasurable.

I am having an amazing year for tomatoes. I planted golden teardrops, which were the first to harvest and they were sweet and delicious. There was a local variety developed by a nearby farm called Janoski's. That was a firm and fleshy tomato with a bright tartness that was great on sandwiches. I also planted beefsteak tomatoes, which are gigantic and are just starting to ripen. Finally, I grew San Marzano's, the wonderful Italian plum variety so prized for its sweet flesh, low moisture and low seed count - which is the perfect variety for sauce. From a single plant I harvested no less than 50 tomatoes! I also had a head of garlic I'd harvested earlier in the season and lots of fresh herbs.  Hot damn, this is the moment I wait for all summer long! It's time to make the sauce. 

HOMEMADE TOMATO SAUCE:

20-25 large, ripe Roma, San Marzano or plum tomatoes

1 large yellow onion 

3 large cloves of garlic

1 cup of white wine

A splash of balsamic vinegar

1/4 cup of dried mushrooms, preferably Porcini

4 stems of fresh basil

Handful of fresh parsley

1 tsp dried oregano

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tbsp. salt

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

You can make your own tomato sauce with just about any kind of tomato, but certain varieties are better than others. The best tomatoes for sauce are paste tomatoes, which have low water content and fewer seeds. You won't have to cook them as long for the sauce to thicken. Save the juicy tomatoes for salads and sandwiches, they taste much better fresh than they do cooked.  Find yourself some plum tomatoes for the best sauce. 

The tomatoes need to be peeled before you can cook with them. The best way to do this is to blanch them in hot water until the skin loosens, then put them in ice water and they peel quite easily. I had a lot of tomatoes to process, so I set up a staging area with my swinging bowl of garden tomatoes, a pot of water over medium low heat, a bowl of ice water and another bowl to hold my peeled tomatoes. I put a small slit in the bottom of each tomato, just to see when the skin begins to peel away from the tomato. I put three or four tomatoes into the pot at a time, allowing them to sit until the skin started to roll back from the flesh, then scooped them out and dropped them to the ice water. While they were cooling, I put the next batch into the pot. By the time I had peeled the first batch, the next one was done blanching. Once I started, the whole operation went pretty quickly and in 30 minutes, I had processed about 25 ripe San Marzano tomatoes. 

Peeled tomatoes

With the tomatoes standing by, it was time to get the sauce started. First, I put the dried mushrooms in a small bowl and covered them with hot water to rehydrate. I diced the onion and threw it into a deep saucepan over medium high heat with some olive oil. I like to add my spices at the beginning to cooking so they have a chance to bloom in the oil, so in went the salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and dried oregano. I let that cook for about 10 minutes until the onions softened and just started to turn golden brown. Now, when it comes to adding the garlic, there are a few different ways you can go. If you crush your garlic, it releases more of its essential oils and you get a very pronounced garlic flavor. You can just smash your garlic cloves a bit, leaving large pieces that will impart mild flavor but that you can fish out later. You can cut your garlic into large chunks, which basically has the same effect as leaving it whole. I like to slice my garlic for sauce. You end up with beautifully soft and sweet garlic slices that impart their flavor without being overpowering. Given that my garlic was really fresh and came out of my own garden about a month earlier, it was pretty assertive to begin with. I thinly sliced three medium cloves of garlic and added them to the onions. If you add the garlic too early, it burns and tastes a little bit like gasoline, so wait until your onions are cooked before you toss that garlic in. 

I let that go for a few minutes, allowing the garlic to release its flavor into the olive oil and letting the onions brown a little bit more.  All these steps help to build additional depth of flavor. Allowing the onions to caramelize and the garlic to cook and the spices to bloom adds nuance to your sauce. When everything was a little brown around the edges, I added the white wine, which sizzled and boiled when it hit the hot saucepan. This step of deglazing with wine or stock washes the caramelized food off the bottom of the pot, adding more flavor to the sauce. Wine tends to be acidic and needs to cook down to burn off the alcohol and concentrate its flavor, so I let this reduce over medium high heat until there was very little liquid left, at which point I added a splash of the water from the mushrooms and a splash of balsamic vinegar. I don't normally measure stuff like this, so a splash might be about 2 tablespoons, but you can let your own taste buds be your guide. I let that reduce down as well until there was almost no liquid left. 

Sauce before and after cooking and blending

Now that everything had cooked and simmered and reduced down, it was time to add the tomatoes. I crushed them with my hands so they were all broken up before adding them to the pot. I removed the hydrated mushrooms out of the water, which was now barely warm, then chopped them finely and added them to the pot. I made a small bundle of the basil and parsley, tied it up with kitchen string, dropped it into the pot and gave it one final stir before turning the heat to low. I wanted the sauce to reduce and thicken, which happens when you leave the pot uncovered and allow the excess liquid to cook off, but I didn't want my entire kitchen to be splattered with tomatoes, so I made a cover out of aluminum foil and draped it loosely over the top, leaving plenty of gaps for the steam to escape. 

I came back a couple times and stirred the sauce, just to see how it was coming along. After an hour, I fished out the fresh herb bundle, whipped out my immersion blender and blitzed that sauce until it was almost smooth but still had a slightly chunky texture. I tasted and WOW, it had intense sweet and zingy tomato flavor. It was delicious as it was, but I let it cook down for another 30 minutes just to thicken up a bit and voila, the sauce was done!

Most sauces, especially tomato sauce, taste better the next day when it has time for the flavors to meld and marry into an amazing symphony of deliciousness. I left mine sitting on the counter to cool off before putting it in jars and putting it in the fridge. My yield was about two quarts of homemade sauce and I had plans for it the following day, which included rolls of roasted eggplant and zucchini stuffed with cheese and pesto, meatballs and gnocchi. It was all scrumptious and I'm saving the rest of the sauce to serve over my own homemade pasta. So there it is - how to make your own tomato sauce that will blow the lid off any jarred product you can buy at the supermarket. If you don't have a garden, I highly suggest you go to your local farmers market while the tomatoes are in season, stock up on the right variety and give this recipe a try.  

End of Summer Dinner

Well, this is it. Its the final week of August and while it still feels like summer, it won't for long. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler and I'm starting to see pumpkin spice flavored everything on the grocery store shelves. In just a few short weeks I'll be putting my sandals and shorts away to make room for boots and jeans.

The end of summer also means the end of summer produce. No more garden tomatoes, no more fresh corn and no more inexpensive peaches and berries. I've been harvesting what I can and getting it processed for the winter. My basil and parsley plants have been tremendously productive this summer and they needed to get trimmed back. I also had a hell of a time last weekend trying to fit everything in my freezer and I decided to cook some of my stored stuff to make room for more.

Our garden was a bit of a disaster this year. Most of our tomato plants came down with late blight and one of them was a variety that was developed specifically for the Heinz company. It is a super Roma that is quite fleshy and has very few seeds, so it is perfect for thick sauces. Before the plant succumbed to blight, it has started to bear fruit and there were about 30 green tomatoes on it. I left the plant alone and let most of the tomatoes ripen. Once they were ripe, I blanched them in hot water, shocked them in ice water, peeled them and put them in containers in the freezer. I had two quarts of those special Roma tomatoes taking up space in the freezer and I also had a huge amount of fresh basil and parsley still growing in my garden. Based on those ingredients, my game plan was to make tomato sauce and fresh pesto for some kind of Italian dinner. After a brief discussion with my husband, we settled on chicken Parmesan and angel hair pasta.

I started with the tomatoes. I'd never grown this variety before, so I wasn't sure how they would taste. I left them to defrost on the kitchen counter for a few hours and as they defrosted I noticed that water was collecting in the bottom of each container. Normally tomatoes put off some juice, but it is typically red just like the tomatoes. This liquid was completely clear, but it had the flavor of sweet tomato juice. I chopped half a yellow onion and sauteed it in olive oil with a little salt, pepper and oregano until it was just starting to brown, then added two cloves of thinly sliced garlic. As soon as the garlic started to brown ever so slightly, I dumped in that clear tomato water and let it reduce for a few minutes to concentrate the flavor. Then I added the still partially frozen tomatoes and let that all simmer together until the tomatoes were completely defrosted. I mashed them a bit with a potato masher and left it to simmer over low heat for about an hour to let some of that liquid reduce. Finally, I used my immersion blender to make a chunky sauce. I was surprised at how sweet these tomatoes were and how much body the sauce had given the amount of juice there was. I set this yummy sauce aside and moved on to the pesto.

I made the pesto following the directions from Tami Dixon who'd made pesto in my kitchen just a few weeks earlier. I wanted to recreate that rough and chunky pesto that Tami made, so I filled my food processor with basil and parsley leaves, added some pine nuts, walnuts, three big cloves of garlic and just pulsed the processor a few times to break everything up. Then I added the olive oil, cheese, salt and pepper and pulsed it just until it was blended. It was chunky and bright green and fragrant just like Tami's. There was quite a bit of pesto and some went directly in the freezer for a future preparation. Once the sauces were made, I moved on to the chicken. I sliced a couple of chicken breasts into cutlets and pounded them out to about half an inch thick.  Each chicken breast yielded four cutlets and I floured them lightly, dipped them in beaten egg and then pressed them into a dish of seasoned Panko breadcrumbs. I pan fried them until they were golden brown and set them on a sheet tray. Once they were all cooked, I covered each one with a healthy dollop of tomato sauce and some shredded provolone cheese and popped them into a 350 oven. After about 10 minutes, I turned the oven off while I boiled the angel hair pasta. When the pasta was cooked, I tossed it with a couple of big spoonfuls of pesto and the rest of the tomato sauce.  I served this delicious dinner with a salad on the side.

The tomato sauce had a very bright, sweet flavor and the tomatoes maintained a nice texture during cooking. If I'd had more of them, I may have cooked a giant pot of tomato sauce and let it boil down to a deep red, rich consistency. Perhaps I will grow them again and next time I will have a bigger yield. The pesto had just the right texture and still had little bits of crunchy walnuts and pine nuts floating around in it.  The earthy and herbaceous flavor of the pesto blended beautifully with the bright tomato sauce and the contrast in texture between the crispy chicken and the soft pasta was a marriage made in heaven. It was simple fare, but made with love from things I grew in my own backyard. You just can't get that kind of fulfillment from a jar or can. When you grow it yourself or buy from a local farmer, you can always trust the quality of your ingredients and your meal will taste that much better when you know where your food came from.