Welcome To The Shakin 'N Bakin Blog!

Welcome to my blog! I love to cook and bake for my family. I hope you enjoy the recipes, foodie reviews, foodie giveaways and cooking tips posted on my blog.

How to Print Recipes: You can print out each individual recipe featured on this blog by clicking the "share" button at the bottom of each post. It will open up to show you options, click on print and another window will open up with the recipe inside it for printing. You can also use the SHARE button to email a copy of the recipe to yourself for printing later.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

How to Cook Down Fresh Tomatoes into Tomato Sauce

Every year we get an abundance of fresh red tomatoes from our garden and I love to cook them down into some homemade tomato sauce. Once it has been cooked down, you can freeze it for later use or home can it. If you are interested in canning it, I have several tomato sauce canning recipes here on my foodie blog under the home canning category.

For the purpose of this particular blog post, I am going to tell you how I like to cook down my fresh tomatoes and turn them into freshly made tomato sauce.

Wash all of your tomatoes and remove the stems/caps. Bring a large pot of salted water to a raging boil. Gently put the tomatoes down into the pot. I like to use tongs to do this part. Once they are in the pot, reduce heat to medium and cover. You will want to check on them every 5 minutes or so because it doesn't take long to cook them.

I always cook mine until the skins start to crack and blister. Then I know they are done. Pour the tomatoes into a colander under cold running water in your kitchen sink. This will help them to cool down quicker so that you can remove the skins.

To remove skins, I cut the core out of the top of the tomato and then gently peel off all of my skins. I cut large tomatoes into quarters, medium tomatoes in half and just toss the small ones into my Ninja blender. While I am peeling off the skins, I like to do it under cold running water which washes away most of the seeds for you. 

Once the pulp is in your blender (I use the Ninja), cover and process until smooth. This should take 30 seconds up to a minute. I then use a cheese cloth over a large bowl and pour my sauce through it. The cheese cloth will grab most of the remaining seeds. No matter how careful I am, I do get a very small amount of seeds in my tomato sauce which doesn't bother us at all. 

Let your sauce completely cool and pour it into freezer containers and freeze. If you are going to can it, you will want to reheat it on the stove top before pouring it into your canning jars. Always leave a 1/2" to 1" headspace. Again, you can look in my canning category to find step-by-step instructions and recipes. 

No comments: