Sauce from fresh tomatoes

[Trogdor33]

I started gardening this year and grew 18 san marzano tomato plants with the expectation that I could make some sauce and can it for my winter pizza making experiments. Wouldn't ya know it, but I pick the year that late blight blows out all the tomatoes in our area. I am left with a couple measly pounds of my precious tomatoes (although my basil and oregano grew just fine) and rather than experiment and risk losing what little I have to error, I figured I would defer to the experts for ideas.

For sauce I normally buy a can of 6-1, make Peter's pj clone sauce and vacuum seal enough to get me by for a little while, but I am aware that fresh ingredients (especially the basil & oregano) change everything, so I don't know if it is even worth attempting.

I am planning on using this on a lehmann's crust (it will be my first time attempting it).

Any ideas?

[madjack]

I would be interested in ideas too, I have more plum tomatoes that I know what to do with.

So far I have been making sauce by starting some EVOO in a pan with some diced onions and a couple cloves of garlic. I blanch the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute or so to remove the skins, then cut them in half and remove the seeds. I dice up the tomatoes into large chunks after cooling a bit and add them to the pot with the garlic/onions/olive oil. I add spices (I also use some fresh) and let everything go on a very low simmer, uncovered for about 20 minutes. I sometimes also dice up a green bell pepper and add it too.

After that I taste and add any more spices that I think it needs, dry spices this time, and remove from the heat. I then use my stick blender, right in the pot to smooth everything out, as the tomatoes are still chunky. Before I got the stick blender I would pour everything into a food processor, run it in there, then back into the pot. At this point the sauce is way too thin to use. To thicken it up I add tomato paste and mix it in until it's thick enough, remembering that it will thicken a little as it cools. To take some of the "bite" out of the additional paste, I add sugar to taste.

After cooling I either can the sauce in small jars (the size normally used for preserves) of freeze individual pizza-sized portions in freezer bags.

I would like to get away from using the tomato paste, but don't know another way of getting a thick enough sauce besides cooking everything down for hours.

One tip I can offer: it takes about three times as many tomatoes as you think it will to make the amount of sauce you are after.

[Trogdor33]

The only way I have found in the past to get away without using some sort of thickener is to remove the seeds and slime from each tomato individually. It makes the sauce much sweeter to be rid of the bitter seeds as well. The only problem with this is that it's extremely time consuming.

I am leaning more toward a fresh sauce as opposed to cooked because I really want the flavor of the tomatoes to be featured. I may just end up blanching, hand seeding and pureeing the tomatoes with some salt and then putting some basil and oregano leaves on the top rather than blending them in. My only problem is the garlic, I would be a little uncomfortable to go through all this work to make it fresh and then adulterate it with granulated garlic, but I may end up doing just that since I am worried that fresh garlic would be too pungent and dominate the sauce.

Next year I think I may just buy a case of 6-1 and forget about garden tomatoes altogether. All this work gardening has just bred more work in sauce making and I doubt I will a much better flavor than I do with 6-1.

[Trogdor33]

Here's what I ended up doing. Some of my tomatoes were getting over-ripe so I decided to act now rather than wait and make my sauce on saturday. Since nobody had any ideas for me I decided to follow the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid).

I started with 24oz of fresh san marzanos from my garden (pic 1). I scored the bottoms in an X pattern, blanched, submersed in ice water and peeled. After peeling, I was left with 21oz (pic 2). Then I cut them in halves, pushed out the seeds and goo with my thumb and removed any green spots. I had 13.4oz after this step (pic 3) although I did have one small tomato that was beginning to rot inside that I got rid of. I would have been closer to 15oz without the one that was rotting.

I strained the juice out of the goo so that I was left with only seeds (which of course are for planting next year). The juice was surprisingly bad tasting despite the great taste of the flesh, so I ended up discarding it.

Finally, I put the tomato flesh into my hand crank food processor and chopped it up to a slightly chunky consistency about that of canned crushed tomatoes (pic 4). I added 3g of kosher salt (~1%) and blended a little more and when I tasted it, I decided to leave it alone for now and add the final flavors to the pizza rather than the sauce. I am planning to chiffonade some basil and oregano on the pizza as well as some parmigiano-reggiano and ground fennel seeds. I may even roast a couple cloves of garlic and squirt them on.

Anyways, I am thrilled to start my pizza making season again. The way my kitchen is set up, it's brutal to heat the oven to 600° in the summer, so I have to suffer without. I made a slightly modified batch of lehmann's ny style dough to try this out on this afternoon at lunch time and can't wait to try this on it.

-Joe

[pacoast]

Nothing will outshine the taste of truly vine ripened tomatoes like homegrown San Marzanos. Even if you have to mix your homegrown tomatoes half + half with canned, it's well worth doing. I too found seeding tomatoes to be the tedious part, but this is easily fixed by investing $25 - $50 in a decent puree sieve. I use a Victorio one & it works well. Most of the time, you don't even have to blanch or peel the tomato skins. The puree sieve will separate the skin & seeds from the rest of the tomato. Then just run through your food processor for 20 seconds.

.

[Trogdor33]

My parents always used the victorio for canning. I would have bought one if I had enough to can this year. For my couple small batches, I just keep telling myself that working with your hands puts love into the food (just like I did before my KA).

[m_pizza]

Trogdor33, so you didn't cook your sauce before putting it on your pizza?

My technique is usually similar - blanch, deseed/decore/rinse/drain off excess juice, put through a food mill to purree, add salt (and a little sugar), and then I cook it on a low heat for about half an hour to thicken it slightly. Sometimes I add some garlic ontop when dressing the pizza but not usually into the sauce

Have you found it works better putting the sauce on raw then? My fresh sauce is nice but not as good as I would want it to be and am not sure where to go to improve it from here...then again I'm not using San Marzano tomatoes like you