Sauce!

Here is the finished first batch of tomato sauce, made with the tomatoes and basil my husband grew hydroponically! We have wanted to make sauce with our own tomatoes for several years, and have previously attempted to grow tomatoes for this purpose. However, this is the first time we succeeded in producing a sufficient quantity of tomatoes.

If you have never made tomato sauce from scratch, here's the general method. First, you quarter the tomatoes and put them in a pot with just enough water on the bottom to keep them from sticking. You don't want to add too much water, because eventually you will be boiling off all that water. Plus, as they heat up the tomatoes will produce a lot of juice, making a lot of water unnecessary. You just need enough so that the tomatoes don't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn before they produce juice. Boil the tomato quarters until they are soft.

Next, you have to push the cooked tomatoes through a strainer. There are two different ways to do this, depending on how many tomatoes you are processing at once. If you are doing a large quantity, the best way is to use a hand cranked food strainer like this one: http://www.amazon.com/B2B-Food-Strainer-Sauce-Maker/dp/B000I4Y4PK. We have one of these and use it for making both applesauce and tomato sauce.

However, if you are doing a smaller quantity of tomatoes, it may not be worth the time it takes to set up (easy) and clean (a little time consuming) this type of large strainer. Instead, use a chinois with a wooden pestle, something like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Fox-Run-3-Piece-Stainless-Steel-Chinois/dp/B0000VLPMQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1337218373&sr=1-1 We have a similar set on a stand, but I don't remember what brand we have -- we bought it locally in a kitchen store. This is the method I used for this batch of sauce.

I forgot to weigh the tomatoes before I cooked them, but after pressing them through the chinois, I had 22 cups of tomato juice / puree. It took about 25 minutes for them to cook to soft -- I probably could have done it quicker at a higher temperature, but I was working on dinner at the same time, so kept the temperature low in order to avoid any possibility of burning. It took a little over an hour to press all the tomatoes through the chinois.

I cooked the tomatoes to soft and pressed them through the chinois yesterday. I did the pressing part in the evening while watching TV and since it takes a long time to reduce the juice / puree down to sauce, I put it in a pot in the frig.

Today, I cooked the juice / puree down to sauce. When you do this part, you will reduce the volume by at least 1/2. Usually, we use tomato paste which helps to thicken the sauce a little more quickly and gives you a higher volume. Today we decided to reduce it down without using tomato paste. I was out of paste and would have had to run to the store to get some, I had time to wait for it to thicken up without paste, and the taste tends to be a little better if you do not use paste.

I put the pot on the stove to start simmering shortly after noon and did not call it finished until 8pm. In order to get the flavor we look for, it takes at least 4 hours to reduce the sauce. We have definitely had batches go longer, as much as 6 hours. Today is the longest I've ever taken to cook down a batch of sauce. Partially this is because I kept the temperature very low for the first couple hours it was on the stove. Since the pot went straight from the frig onto the stove, I didn't want to keep it heat it up too quickly. Plus, I had a couple errands to run and if I kept the temperature too high the sauce could quickly burn in my absence. Once I turned the temperature up, it took about 6 hours to finish. The closer you get to finished, the more you have to stir it in order to prevent burning and sticking.

Over the years, my husband and I have developed a standard sauce recipe. While it may be our "standard," that really means standard starting place. Each batch of tomatoes is unique, and we always tinker at the end until the batch tastes the way we like it. Our recipe includes fresh basil and parsley, dried oregano and thyme (though we are starting to grow these two herbs and will be working on figuring out correct measurements for fresh), freshly grated Locatelli (a pecorino romano brand), salt and pepper.

I'm not going to give away our proportions :-) I will give you two hints, though. We add most of the ingredients to the pot when we start cooking so the flavors have time to blend. However, if you add cheese to your sauce, do not add it to the pot until the last 45 minutes or so of cooking. In our experience, if you add cheese too early in the process, the sauce develops a slightly bitter flavor that I find unpleasant. In addition, you should not add much salt to the sauce until you have all the cheese stirred in because the cheese is a little salty and can throw off your flavor balance if you have already added a lot of salt to the pot.