Tomato Sauce

Putting Up Food - Tomatoes

As I've said in the past, I like to make pizza from scratch to help keep the budget in check.  We eat pizza once a week so ordering out all the time would get costly.  Something else I've started doing is making my own tomato sauce to go on our pizza.  It's not about saving a buck though because tomato sauce for the most part is pretty cheap at the store.  Making my own sauce is more about the self satisfaction I get from growing our own food and going local to help support local farmers.

I started a few tomato plants back in late May, but due to our shady yard, they've been few and far between and slow to ripen.  Hence, I started a tomato collection in the freezer.

Every time we had ripe tomatoes on the vine, they got put into a freezer bag to await their fate of becoming sauce.  Once nice thing about freezing tomatoes for sauce is that the skins slip right off when you run them under warm water.  This makes for super easy processing.

I wish I could say that I relied completely on my own plants to provide enough tomatoes for sauce, but I can't.   Thankfully though, my CSA provider was able to sell me some at a good rate.  I picked up seventeen pounds for $10.  Being fresh tomatoes, they take a little more effort to get them peeled.  A pot of boiling water works best.  You just slice an X into the bottom of the tomato and then drop it in the boiling water for about 30 seconds.

When you pull the tomatoes out and they begin to cool, the skins begin to pull away.  I wait till they are cool and slip the skin right off.

With the skin off, I cut off the top end.  That's all the cutting I do.  Rather than chop, I gently squeeze each tomato over a large bowl to expel excess juice and some seeds.  The remaining pulp gets thrown in to my stainless steel pot.  Once all the tomatoes have been squeezed and have gone into the pot, they get simmered over medium low heat for two hours.  I mash and stir occasionally as well.

After one hour 

After two hours 

You can see by the residue lines on the inside of the pot that over half of the water has been evaporated.  That's exactly what you want to happen so that you end up with a nice thick sauce.  At this point, I put mine through the blender to make it smooth.

After that, I let it cool in the pot for about an hour.  Then I portioned it out to go into the freezer.  I like to put one cup of sauce into snack size ziplock bags.  This is the perfect portion for our pizzas.  To make sure it's freezer safe, I put the snack size bags into a freezer rated ziplock.

My twenty five pounds of tomatoes yielded 9 cups of sauce.  When I am ready to use these, I just drop one into a large cup of hot water.  When it's thawed, I cut the bottom corner off and am able to squeeze it onto the pizza crust with no mess. 

This post is shared with Fat Tuesday, Fill Those Jars Friday and Frugally Sustainable.