Recipes  

you_are_are Home » Techniques » Our Tips for Making Homemade Tomato Sauce

Our Tips for Making Homemade Tomato Sauce

It’s tomato season and we’re making the most of their abundance to start a new tradition: the tomato party! Turn your harvest into a sauce that can be stored in the freezer or in jars, in preparation for the long winter months ahead. Here are our tips and recipes.

Tomato sauce preparation method

1. Ripen the tomatoes

Purchase tomatoes 2 or 3 days before making the sauce and place them on a cloth outside to maximize ripening and develop the fruits’ flavours.

 

2. Blanch

First, blanch the tomatoes by plunging them into boiling water for 2 to 3 minutes, depending on their ripeness. Then cut them in half to check the inside of the tomato. Discard any that are damaged.

 

3. Press

Next, run the tomatoes through a grinder. The tomato purée is now ready to be cooked.

 

4. Cook

Using thick-bottomed pots, cook the tomato purée over medium heat until thick, stirring and skimming as it cooks. This can take between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours, depending on the amount of purée and the size of your pots.

What you need to know before making tomato sauce

Choose the right tomato variety

You can opt for Italian Roma tomatoes, and also San Marzano. These varieties are perfect for making a nice sauce, as they don’t contain much water and have few seeds.

Assess your needs

Electric or manual machine? This depends on the amount of tomatoes you need to grind. If you’re planning on making a very large batch of tomato sauce, it’s best to choose an electric machine. They’re sold in specialty kitchen stores, at various prices.

Buy the right quantity of tomatoes

Note that 20 lbs (9.2 kg) of Italian tomatoes yield about 16 cups (4 L) of sauce. So be sure to calculate the weight of tomatoes you need to buy based on the amount of sauce you wish to make.

Properly store your sauce

When making a large batch of tomato sauce, you can put it in glass jars to store in the pantry. Make sure you sterilize the jars and add salt and lemon juice to the sauce so that it can be safely consumed. For the complete sterilization technique, refer to our recipe for canned tomato sauce.

Tomato

Freezer storage

  1.  Buy good quality freezer bags with a practical closure, preferably one that slides.
  2.  Before filling, label the bags with their contents and the production date of the tomato sauce. It’s recommended to prepare bags of 1, 2 and 3 cups (250, 500 and 750 ml), which are ideal cooking amounts. Often, a 1-cup (250 ml) bag is enough for a pizza, whereas a large 3-cup (750 ml) bag is perfect for making pasta for a family of four or five people.
  3.  Using a ladle and a wide-mouth jam funnel, fill the bags up to three-quarters full, no more than that.
  4.  Freeze the bags flat on a baking sheet. You can then store them as you like in the freezer.

For a few tomato sauce-based meal ideas, try these recipes: