Easy Homemade Tomato Sauce
We got home from Texas late last week. Hooray!
Waiting for us as we walked in the door, though, were bucketloads of tomatoes from our 200+ plants. I’m thrilled that our tomato plants are thriving this year! Last year, we didn’t properly amend our pitiful soil, and the poor plants didn’t do well at all.
We don’t eat a lot of the tomatoes themselves, but we’re tomato sauce-eating fiends.
We found this method of tomato sauce preparation via Pinterest, and I think I’m in love. It cuts the cooking time down to a fraction of what it used to be.
Here’s what you do:
- Cut your tomatoes up
- Cook them
- Drain them well
- Purée them
The juice that you drain off will still contain some solids so that it will remain red. So, of course, if you boiled all the juice down, you’d get a slightly more concentrated sauce than with this method.
On the other hand, since we canned all the drained-off juice, there was no wastage, unlike when you boil the juice down and let it evaporate.
After draining the tomatoes as much as we could, we ran the pulp that was left in our colander through what is affectionately known around here as the “popper
.”
If you do any tomato processing, jam making, apple sauce, apple butter making, etc., you need one of these
. I’m not kidding. My mom has had the Velox Tomato Press
, as well as the Victorio strainer, for at least fifteen years, and the “popper”
far outshines the Victorio. The only drawback is that you need a smooth surface for the suction cup to adhere to.
Anyhoo, back on the topic. The tomato pulp that came out of the strainer was almost thick enough that we didn’t have to boil it down at all! In fact, my suggestion was just to let well enough be good enough.
Mom decided to try letting the sauce evaporate a little in the crockpot overnight, though, and this is what we got:
Not bad, right?! We’ll be doing this again – probably many times over as we pick tomatoes every other day.
