Saturday, August 21, 2010

Canning the sauce

Had another 25 pound box of tomatoes show up.  This time though, I decided to sauce them.  Relatively easy honestly, there's a basic and herbed sauce recipe in the Ball Complete book that I followed for the most part.  But since I don't have a food mill, I peeled, cored and seeded the tomatoes before cooking them down.  As I was peeling, coring and seeding I just chucked the cleaned halves of the tomatoes directly into my stock pot.  Once it was full I put it on to start cooking while I finished the rest.  I didn't add any water, just the collected juice from the seed pulp. Added the remaining tomatoes once the amount I started with had reduced enough to do so.
After everything softened up a bit I took out my handy stick blender and pureed the tomatoes in the stock pot.  Left them a little chunky, not too much but enough to have some texture.  As for the herbs, I added granulated garlic, dry basil, dry oregano, dry onion flakes, salt, balsamic vinegar and a bit of red wine.  All to taste.  This I let cook a while until everything seemed nice and combined flavor wise but it still seemed a bit 'thin' so I added in 2 cans of tomato paste.  This is a normal addition for our regular sauce anyway.  Let it cook a bit more and it was ready.
Poured them all up and processed according to the lovely requirements in the Ball book and viola, 7 quarts and 3 pints of ready to use tomato sauce.

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