Making Pasta and Tomato Sauces

 

There are plenty of tomatoes ripening this week so it was time to make sauce.

 

Firstly some Tomato sauce or Ketchup. We use a recipe from Sally Wise's fantastic book for preserves called "A Year in a Bottle".

 

6kg tomatoes

1kg onions

750g sugar

2 cups vinegar

120g salt

1.5 tbsp. whole cloves

1.5tbsp allspice berries

0.5 tsp cayenne pepper

 

All the ingredients were boiled up and cooked for 4 hours. The mixture was then whizzed with the processor stick, strained through a sieve and boiled again before pouring into warm bottles that had been sterilised in the oven for 20 minutes.

 

The tomato sauce mixture is on the right. The large pot is for the pasta sauce. With this we have no exact recipe. Some oil, onion and garlic is sautéed first, then zucchinis or other excess vegetables are roughly chopped and added before the tomatoes are added. This is boiled up until mostly liquid, pureed with the stick and then bottled in jars. This large saucepanful filled 18 375g jars which is nearly 7 litres of sauce. Last year we made about 90 jars and ran out a week before the first jar of this season was made.
We use it on pasta, in meatballs, on pizzas and it provides a rich and tasty sauce all year.

 

A variety of tomatoes ready for the pot. It doesn't matter if some are salad tomatoes, beef tomatoes or cherry tomatoes. They all go in.