Unfortunately, the Topsy Turvy tomato planters we used this year were sucky-sucky, and I didn't produce the crop I was hoping to. Still determined to make sauce for the winter, I was given a large box of Amish country tomatoes from my in laws this past weekend.
On Monday afternoon I started my half a day long project of sauce making. There are many methods to making a delicious sauce, but regardless of how you create it there are a few important rules to live by when creating your masterpiece:
1. Be mindful of your ingredients. Will you use fresh tomatoes or canned? Garlic cloves or powder? Every item you add to your sauce will impact your result. For the record, I like to only use fresh ingredients when they are available, however I have used cans of San Marzano tomatoes and the sauce was still quite good. Different, but good.
2. Cooking time is important to the flavor of your sauce. How long will you cook your sauce? Certainly a "quick" sauce can be made, but many believe the sauce should romantically bubble away for hours for the flavors to meld together and intensify.
3. Proper storage is key to preservation and flavor. Will you can or freeze your sauce? I like to can mine to save space in the freezer, and also so I can give the jars as gifts. It's much more beautiful to give a mason jar with a ribbon and handwritten tag around the mouth than a slimy frozen plastic container, in my opinion.
To start my sauce I first removed the skins and seeds from my tomatoes, which was probably the longest and most hands on part of making my tomato sauce. When doing that, I roasted a couple of heads of garlic in the oven. To do this, cut each of the heads in half so the cloves are all in halves. Place the heads in a sheet of aluminum foil, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, and the wrap the heads up nice and tight. Place your garlic in an oven preheated to 350 degrees, and in 30 minutes remove the softest and most delicious smelling garlic you've even seen.
After the tomatoes are prepped and the garlic is roasted, I threw both ingredients along with sauteed white onions into a large stock pot. On medium heat, I let the ingredients come to a boil to let the juices evaporate and thicken up a bit.
After the sauce thickens, I turned the heat to low and added kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, white sugar, and fresh herbs. The sauce was then left untouched for hours to allow the flavors to cook together. After a few hours I took out my trusty immersion blender and gave the sauce a good blend (normally I wouldn't mind a few chunks, but in hopes that the kids will be eating my sauce I had to make it as smooth as possible).
Later, I transferred my sauce into warm sanitized mason jars. The jars were then put into a water bath to lock in the seal and preserve the sauce.
After the jars were processed I transferred them to a clean towel, where they rested untouched overnight.
I checked on the jars yesterday morning and luckily all of the seals took! I kept a small container of leftover sauce in the fridge, and tossed it with some farfalle and parmesan last night for dinner.... mmmmm! The canned sauce has a shelf life of one year, although I'm not sure it will last that long in our house. Perhaps I should at least stash away a jar or two for after the baby is born so I can at least enjoy my sauce with a deep glass of red wine, but for now a crusty piece of bread dipped in the sauce is quite enough to make me content.
