How do you tomato sauce? (fresh tomatoes)

I’m curious how others make their home made tomato sauce - from fresh tomatoes. . . .

My local farm stand is selling big baskets of tomatoes right now. I bought 2 . . so about 16-20 pounds of roma tomatoes. (They are also selling beefsteak type tomatoes for less!) So today I’m turning them into tomato sauce.

My go to recipe is Marcella Hazan’s recipe which essentially just tomatoes, a halved onion (which is removed at the end), butter, and salt. It is delicious, but i do add a sprig or two of basil to mine as well (removed at the end).

Any other go to recipes? (I may make more tomato sauce but I’m also considering tomato soup - but that’s another topic I guess).

If you do make tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes - I’m also curious how you prep the tomatoes for the sauce. Every year I seem to do it slightly differently - I’ve done:
– blanched to peel the skin, then just chopped
– blanched to peel and then also dig out the seeds with my hands
– slided raw and passed through a food mill (not doing that again)
– this time I sliced in half the long way, cooked in a pot for 10-20 minutes (it was 18 lbs) to soften and then passed through the food mill

The food mill after cooking a little too soften the tomatoes and loosen the skin seemed to leave quite a bit of “stuff” behind (skin, seed, and probably tougher cores), which maybe is a good thing, but made we think I might go back to blanching to peel and then letting the heat break down the rest . . . . we’ll see how it turns out.

Depends on my mood and patience. I just recently made a corn/tomato sauce with heirloom cherry tomatoes, where I didn’t bother skinning them (too tiny).

That said, I’m not a huge fan of skins in my sauce, so I will do like you & blanch to peel, but I don’t seed them (I remove the tougher/fibrous green parts, however). I chop them into manageable pieces or chunks and let them cook down.

The sauce starts with shallots & garlic sautéed in olive oil, maybe a few anchovies to melt into the oil, and RPF. Then I often toast a little tomato paste before adding a splash of open red wine, letting that reduce & adding the tomatoes, s&p, oregano.

That’s pretty much it, but I sometimes leave out the anchovies, or the tomato paste.

I roast, usually for a long time if I’m not using paste tomatoes, with onions garlic, olive oil , s&p. Depending on what I am making I may puree or put through food mill.

I chop and roast the tomatoes in the oven.

I have been roasting or sauteeing the onions and garlic separately lately, then I add them to the tomatoes a little later.

I haven’t been using food mill or blender. We eat it rustic and chunky.

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a little salt is the only add - because it eventually gets used for pizza/stewed tomato/pasta+ . . .

Do you blend in some way (stick blender/etc)? Or keep the large skin pieces in there as is?

I roast with oo, garlic and herbs and run through a food mill. Works great if I have a lot of cherry tomatoes.

I do the same but sauté some sliced garlic in olive oil, then add cored and quartered tomatoes and cook down. Food mill, then freeze.

depends on the end use - anything that needs more ‘saucy’ gets cooked a bit further, then stick blendered & seasoned.

for pizza, it is thawed, drained in a sieve i.e. mechanically dewatered, then heated and stick blended - that produces a ‘fresh’ tomato “sauce” for a pizza. seriously different and tastier than any ‘jarred’ sauce. I prefer to sauce a pizza with hot tomato (whatever) - helps with a crispy crust…

stewed & similar - heated, perhaps reduced. seasoned, skins and all . . .

We’ve done a couple of batches of Alexandra Cooks Roasted Tomato Sauce with our glut of tomatoes this summer. We freeze in small jars. I make it with whatever tomatoes I have - not just sungolds.

+1 on the food mill, especially if you’re making a larger batch.

+1 on roasting. Tried it on a whim last year and it’s 1000x easier than my prior go-to of blanching, skinning, simmering, blah, blah, blah.

Roasting is so easy here: Rough chop – big chunks – right into a high walled baking pan, overpacked if needed. Bit of salt. 375F. Occasional stir to even out the caramelization, and a couple of hours later it’s good to go, basically reduced and ready. I prefer to pass the end result through a food mill to get rid of excess skin but can totally see the rustic approach. Just made a large batch yesterday; the tomatoes are finally coming in heavy. 10m of active work, vs what would have been at least 3 hours with my prior method??? Total win.

Those tomatoes will be ripe, of course–but not ripe enough. Ripen them yourself until they’re so soft that in a market they’d be tossed out–or put on special, $1 a dozen. Overripe tomatoes are maximally sweet and perfect for sauce. We are always very pally with out produce guy (a bottle of wine a couple of times a year) so he’ll hold the over-ripes for us–and at a buck a bag, too.