I’m getting into an area of the book where I have to skip a few recipes. The one I was supposed to do in order was some jam. Unfortunately, we don’t have equipment for canning – and I’m just not sure I really want to invest in such a thing right now. Not to say that I’m not interested – but just not right now. This weeks – or technically, last weeks recipe was a tomato sauce that could be made with ingredients that most people have stocked in their pantry by default. Well, mostly.
I cheated and used some fresh herbs
The recipe, which is identical on the website and in the book, calls for some pretty standard items. The only fresh ingredients are the onion, celery and carrot. We always have carrot chunks on hand for Ivy, so I just used those. We actually usually don’t stock canned tomatoes – we tend to buy fresh – but I bought some canned ones for this. Where I did cheat was the herbs. The recipe calls for dried oregano and basil. We actually didn’t have dried basil, so I decided to just pull leaves from our Aerogarden. We have dried oregano, but I decided to go ahead and use fresh leaves of those as well. Lastly, we don’t have sherry vinegar. We’ve got cooking sherry, but it’s not quite the same. Based on a couple discussions across the net, I used half cooking sherry and half rice wine vinegar. Ideally, I should have used white wine vinegar, but we didn’t have that either.
Boil the herbs, sugar and tomato liquids down
The carrots and celery don't really come through
The first portion of the recipe is really simple. Combine the liquid of the tomatoes with the herbs and most of the flavorful ingredients. The recipe isn’t very clear on this, but based on cooking times, one should prep things ahead so that the liquids can start cooking at around the same time that the mirepoix goes into the oven. Mirepoix is, of course, just the traditional combination of celery, onions and carrots – the fresh ingredients.
The tomatoes take a long time to brown around the edges
Once the onions have softened under the broiler, the whole peeled tomatoes are added to the mirepoix to sit under the broiler. The recipe estimates that they take about 15-20 minutes under the broiler before the tomatoes are browned around the edges. Under ours, it took about 25 minutes. Meanwhile, the liquids on the stove had reduced by half like the recipe explained – but I don’t know that I would call it “syrup-like”. To me, that means that it should stick to a spoon a bit. It didn’t, but I had already boiled out all the water by this point.
Time for tomato smashing
Combining the broiled vegetables and the liquids, it was time to mash. I could have used an immersion blender if we had one, but we don’t – so it was time for the potato masher. That worked out well though – I like some chunks. An immersion blender would have chewed those up a lot more.
Verdict
Over the past year or so, I’ve added crushed red pepper flakes to just about every tomato sauce I’ve bought. This tomato sauce has plenty. Between the red pepper flakes and the garlic cloves (make sure to smash them thoroughly, i had a few chunks that were still too large), this has a good spicy flavor. I really didn’t taste much of the mirepoix, but the flavor acts as a solid base. If I had a single complaint, it’s that the tomatoes released a lot of liquid when I mashed them – even after being drained and broiled. As a result, the sauce was not as thick as I would have liked. I could have boiled it down further, but I was making this as the recipe instructs to. That aside, I was blown away at how good this sauce was. Ideally, I really would have liked a recipe that used fresh tomatoes instead – as canned tomatoes tend to have preservatives in them that I’d like to cut out as much as possible. For about the price of a jar of tomato sauce, I made enough for three jars (two jars worth in separate containers in the freezer) and one serving.
I may try to work in fresh tomatoes instead, and boil down the final product a bit more, but this is a great recipe.
All Pantry Tomato Sauce Rating: 
It's a little watery, but good
