Recipe: Tomato Sauce

So since we started our garden about four years ago Mitch has always wanted to make our own tomato sauce. He received a recipe from his buddy, and we've been tweaking it ever since. I have to laugh because we literally change it every year. Our goal is to finally figure out the best tomato sauce for our family, and we still haven't gotten it quite right, but heck someday we'll get there!

So this year we had a TON of tomatoes! We even weighed them! 25lbs is a lot of frozen tomatoes! Most of them came from our garden, some came from the Keener Plaza garden, and some came from my mother in laws garden. We are an equal opportunity tomato family. We don't care where it comes from as long as we know it's organic.

25lbs! 0.0!

Yeah, that's a BIG pot!

So here's the starter recipe that we go by. Like I said we tweak it to our tastes, but for all intents and purposes it's a great place to start.

3 lbs of Tomatoes

1 celery stalk cut into chunks

1 small onion cut in chunks

1 carrot cut into chunks

Put all of the above ingredients in a pot over medium to low heat and simmer until most of the tomato juice evaporates. Let cool, then strain through a food mill or a Kitchen Aide strainer attachment.

1 small onion

4-5 garlic cloves minced

1 TBSP sugar

1/2 TBSP salt

Brown the onions, add garlic, simmer a minute or two, then add tomato sauce. Add salt and sugar, simmer. Add more to taste

So as you can see we had A LOT more than 3lbs of tomatoes! So obviously you have to take the 25lbs and divide it by 3 and see where it gets us. At this point this kind of sauce has turned into an science project and less like an art form. So this year, we decided to use a whole package of celery, a whole bag of yellow onions (3 lb bag) and a whole bag of carrots. We really were winging it. It looked right. 

This year I've also fallen in love, if you could use that term when you are talking about food, with hatch peppers! Mitch has put them in our sauce before and seriously it was DIVINE! So when I went to go pick up the extras that we needed I picked up about 6 huge hatch peppers and 4 regular bell peppers. You can't go wrong with getting as many colors into your sauce as possible. Red, yellow, green, and orange peppers rounded out our culinary color wheel.

Mitch froze his hands off cutting these tomatoes up, but it looked nice.

So with 25+ lbs of ingredients you need a BIG pot! It's a 12 quart pot.

So Mitch decided that we had to do this in stages. We cut up all the ingredients and put them into three separate bowls. We had tomatoes EVERYWHERE!

It's so pretty! So colorful!

So after we simmered the first bit down, we had to add more...

Round two and three ended up looking like this until it all simmered down.

Once this was all cooked down, and simmered to perfection it had to be turned off to cool. Granted, at this point, given the weather we could have put it outside on the back deck with a rock on top of the lid to cool, but Mitch figured it'd be safer in the fridge. The man has no sense of adventure! I guess if I would have frozen my hands off cutting up all those tomatoes I would have erred on the side of caution too! Captain Obvious pointed out that even a Raccoon could take the rock off the lid.

After it cooled overnight it was time for the Squeezo!

NOTE TO SELF: Please be careful at this stage in the game. Last year 2 quarts of sauce ended up all over the kitchen floor because someone *cough cough* didn't secure the Squeezo to the block correctly. It looked like someone had been murdered and bleed to death on our kitchen floor. Anyway, figured I'd just share that little story of caution with you. Lets just say the floor was STILL sticky after I had mopped it three times! The Queen of the house was not amused!

Gotta love our Cuisinart! 

This is where I made quick work of the onions and garlic! After we browned all this awesomeness up, added it to the sauce, put the sauce back on the stove, and heated it back up to 160 degrees. Et Viola! Now the sauce was ready for the hot steaming jars. 

It should look pretty close to this when you get ready to can.

For tomato sauce it has to be put in a water bath for 30 minutes to can.

There are a lot of great books on canning if you are interested. 

This one is my favorite: Ball-Blue-Book-Guide-Preserving

Now on to the fun part, NOT SPLASHING this sauce everywhere.
Time is your friend. It's hot, so take it slow.

Well, the wee one decided that she had taken a long enough nap and wanted to get up JUST as we were trying to get the sauce into jars. She comes from a very long line of counter sitters. She does great up there, especially when she's still in the "waking" up stage from waking up.  Don't fret, I was between her and the sauce, and since she had a birds eye view of the goings on she was happy as clam!

Teddy and the Little Miss C

All in all we ended up with 10 quarts. Not too shabby, and I believe it's a win-win when we don't have to clean up 2 spilled quarts on the kitchen floor. Granted, in all actuality we could have just run to Schnucks down the street and bought 10 quarts of tomato sauce, but then we wouldn't be able to post fun stuff like this. It's a great lesson in teamwork with your spouse. If you both can survive canning in a small kitchen, with three children under foot, and everything that comes with running that operation, then you can survive a lot.

Happy canning everyone!