How to cook down tomatoes?

Making Freezer Friendly Tomato Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes is a labor of love, but it’s so worth it if you have an abundance of tomatoes right now! It’s the ideal way to use up all of these fresh tomatoes during tomato season.

Storing and Serving Fresh Tomato Sauce

Transfer the sauce into freezer bags or containers after it has cooled. Sauce can be frozen for at least three months before freezer burn or off flavors begin to appear.

You can also hot-water can the tomato sauce if you’re feeling particularly diligent by transferring the hot sauce to sterilized canning jars, tightly sealing with new lids, and boiling for 30 minutes.

The only ingredients in this sauce are tomatoes and some lemon juice, which raises the acidity to a safe level for canning. You can season it with herbs, garlic, and onions to create no-cook tomato sauce or fresh tomato blender sauce. You can also make fresh tomato sauce that has been marinated by adding oil, garlic, and basil to tomato pulp. However, I like that this can serve as a neutral base for any recipe I want to make, from quick lasagna to weeknight Margherita pizzas. If you want to can your sauce, just stay away from using oil because it might be a source of botulism.

‘Mater Matters: The Best Tomatoes for Sauce

If you’re lucky, you can get perfect tomatoes from a farmer or perhaps your backyard during the summer, and if you can, Daniel has already demonstrated how to make the best tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, so that’s the first and most crucial question.

However, if you’re like the majority of us, canned tomatoes are your best option.

You can find canned tomatoes in a variety of forms at the grocery store—crushed, diced, in sauce, etc.—but you want whole peeled plum tomatoes packed in juice or puree. The tomatoes packed whole are almost always of better quality than those used for crushed or diced tomatoes, and they give you more freedom to chop them to whatever size you’d like. While it is possible to find a good can of crushed tomatoes, they are not as common.

If you have a favorite tomato brand, stick with it: I prefer Muir Glen and Cento among the widely accessible, American-produced tomatoes. If you can find them, D is always a good choice. O. P. San Marzano tomatoes imported from Italy. The D. O. P. the seal guarantees that they were grown, harvested, and processed in accordance with very strict guidelines that ensure a particular baseline quality.

I can hear you now: “D. O. P. It’s true that the best doesn’t always mean the best: If you know where to look, you can find better tomatoes. But the D. O. P. San Marzano olives are widely available and come with a quality guarantee. I like that.

I tried a few different methods of puréeing the tomatoes. A blender or hand blender can make a relatively smooth sauce; I prefer my sauce to have larger tomato chunks. Although it’s a little messy to clean up, the food processor produces results that are close to ideal.

Instead, I decided to roll up my sleeves, put away the machines, and go 100% analog here

The best texture for a chunky sauce is achieved by squeezing tomatoes between your fingers, and it is also incredibly relaxing. This sauce will cook down to a rough, chunky texture that is fine enough to coat a strand of spaghetti or a good meatball while maintaining plenty of body.

Olive Oil Is Essential for Flavor and Texture

Were getting a bit ahead of ourselves here though. You must first add oil to the pot before you can add your tomatoes. Oil serves a number of different functions in a sauce. First and foremost, its a flavor transfer medium. You can release flavorful compounds, many of which are fat-soluble, by breaking down the cell structure of aromatics like garlic and sautéing it in oil. Then, these fat-soluble substances disperse throughout the sauce.

Additionally, oil is less volatile than, say, water and allows you to cook at higher temperatures. Many chemical processes that produce flavor don’t happen when water is 212°F from boiling. When heated well above this temperature, oil is an edible medium. Finally, fat adds flavor and texture of its own. Some people will advise you not to use extra-virgin olive oil when cooking because it taints the oil’s flavor. Poppycock!.

It’s true that some of the flavors will deteriorate. But on the other hand, a flavorless oil like canola or vegetable has virtually none at all. You do the math. Alternatively, allow me to finish the task for you: a lot The flavor of sauces made with high-quality olive oil will be noticeably superior to those made with neutral oil. Of course, adding a few drops of fresh olive oil at the end doesn’t hurt either.

If you heat good olive oil too much, especially when using olive oils with a lot of sediment, it can burn and become acrid. However, there is never a chance of the oil smoking when making a sauce like this (unless something very wrong is done).

In terms of texture, fat gives a sauce a rich, mouth-coating feel both when it separates from the sauce on its own and when it is emulsified with the liquid phase, making the entire dish creamier.

Olive oil works well for this on its own. But heres a trick:

Add a bit of butter in there as well. Butterfat adds a creamy, fresh flavor to the mixture and emulsifies much more easily with liquids.

Some slow-cooked tomato sauces start with both onions and garlic. In Goodfellas, Vinnie prepares his prison sauce in a similar manner (with garlic that has been sliced so thinly that it can be read through with a razor blade, no less), and my former chef Barbara Lynch of No. 9 Park in Boston made hers. No matter how finely you chop it or how slowly you cook it to break it down, I personally find the onion bits in the finished sauce to be distracting, so I omit the onion.

On the other hand, plenty of garlic is necessary.

Though I opted to chop it with a knife rather than using Vinnies razor blade trick, I still used a full 2 cloves per 28-ounce, or 800-gram, can of tomatoes (that’s 8 cloves for the entire pot). I contrasted freshly chopped garlic with that that was grated on a microplane and put through a garlic press. In many applications, those methods are fine. But in this case, both produce too-small, overly-moist pieces of garlic. Instead of softening and becoming aromatic, it very rapidly burns. Hand-chopped is the way to go.

The secret to cooking garlic successfully is to cook it slowly so that its flavor can permeate the hot oil and butter while preventing the butter from browning or burning.

How to Make Tomato Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes