Showing posts with label Tomato sauce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tomato sauce. Show all posts

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.