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 so happy our tomato plants are doing well 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 kind of 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 was.

Basically, here’s what you do:

• Cut your tomatoes up
• Cook them
• Drain them well
• Purée them

The juice that you drain off will have some solids in it, so it will still be red. So, of course, if you boiled all the juice down, you’d get a slight bit more sauce than you would with this method.

On the other hand, since we canned all the drained-off juice, there was no wastage like there is when you boil the juice down, letting it evaporate off.

After draining the tomatoes as well 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 have to have a smooth surface for the suction cup to stick 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 to just 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 definitely be doing this again – probably many times over as we pick tomatoes ever-other day.

P.S. Please excuse the mess in the background – we’re messy cooks!

Not bad right?! We’ll definitely be doing this again – probably many times over as we pick tomatoes ever-other day.

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 so happy our tomato plants are doing well 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 kind of 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 was.

Basically, here’s what you do:

• Cut your tomatoes up
• Cook them
• Drain them well
• Purée them

The juice that you drain off will have some solids in it, so it will still be red. So, of course, if you boiled all the juice down, you’d get a slight bit more sauce than you would with this method.

On the other hand, since we canned all the drained-off juice, there was no wastage like there is when you boil the juice down, letting it evaporate off.

After draining the tomatoes as well 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 have to have a smooth surface for the suction cup to stick 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 to just 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 definitely be doing this again – probably many times over as we pick tomatoes ever-other day.

P.S. Please excuse the mess in the background – we’re messy cooks!