I love this time of the year. There is an abundance of amazing produce available including some very tasty tomatoes. I normally try to grow some, but with my kitchen renovations this year, I did not get a garden going. But, fortunately for me, my local grocery store brings in large quantities of Ontario field grown Roma tomatoes, which happen to be my preferred tomato for making sauce with. And there is little I enjoy more than to have a wealth of bottle tomato sauce in the pantry for winter pasta dishes. Its almost as if you can taste the sunshine coming right through the sauce.
I did a video all about pizza last week, which upon reflection, I realized that I could have broken into a few different videos, giving people the option to watch a few short ones instead of one large one. Well, this blog and accompanying YouTube channel has been a learning process, so this time around, I decided to break down the different stages into separate videos. I also released an extended cut just in case someone wanted to watch it as one long video.
I begin with showing you how to peel a tomato. This sounds like such an easy task, but like most tasks in a kitchen, there are tips and tricks that the professionals use. This technique will hopefully help you work faster and ensure that you can increase the yield of your tomatoes.
The key is to use boiling water to cook the peels and then to drop the tomatoes into an ice water bath to stop the cooking process. This will allow the peels and only the peels to come off with little effort so that you don’t have to cut into the flesh of the tomato at all.
Once I have all of the tomatoes peeled, I move onto making a tomato sauce. Again, I demonstrate a very simple sauce that is easy to make using just five ingredients.
As I explain in the video, I do not season the tomato sauce at all, since I am unsure what I will be using this sauce for in the future. I want it to be a blank canvas that offers me as many options as possible. To make the sauce, I used the following amounts:
5kg of peeled tomato
1kg mirepoix/soffritto
(500g onions)
(250g carrots)
(250g celery)
olive oil
Basically, you take about 20% weight of the tomatoes that you have and add that for mirepoix. Mirepoix, or soffritto, as it gets referred to in Italian cookery, is a combination of onions (50%), carrots (25%), and celery (25%) and are some aromatics that form the basis for many, many savoury dishes from stocks and sauce, to soups, and is even used at the bottom of roasting pans for many meats.
Once I complete the sauce, I then go through the basics of home bottling or canning. Now, as I point out a number of times in the videos, there is always a risk when home bottling or canning. Botulism contamination is a particular risk when working with vegetable matter, so I would STRONGLY URGE YOU to seek out additional information and do not use my videos as your sole source. I have been doing this for a long time, and I feel confident that I have done everything safely, but proceed with caution. It only takes one mistake to create some very dangerous food.
One thing I do note in the video is that this sauce freezes extremely well, so if you have any concerns about bottling food for yourself, you can always freeze it for future use.
So there you have it. And you can click the link below if you want to watch the extended version