Late summer is tomato harvest season and that means preserving what I cannot eat fresh. Since I had Labor Day off from my night shift job I decided to stay up and make my oven roasted tomato sauce...
I am not sure where I first found this method for making tomato sauce. For many years I used the traditional method of making tomato puree with a food mill and slow cooking the sauce all day to reduce and thicken. I even tried using a crockpot overnight but the results were not what I wanted.
For this method tomatoes are sliced and put onto onto oiled sheet pans and drizzled with olive oil, garlic powder, and salt and roasted in my convection oven at 400 degrees F for 60 mins. I rotate my pans half way through for even roasting. Don’t worry if they look a little black around the edges. That does not seem to affect the flavor.
The roasted tomatoes are then pureed with my VKP Food Strainer (formerly Victoria brand) this is probably my favorite kitchen gadget and makes wonderful sauce separating all of the seeds and skins. The puree is very thick and smooth. This tool is very simple to use. They do take a little extra effort to take apart and clean after making sauce, but it is well worth the time. It is just another part of my summer garden routine.
The roasting removes over half of the water and concentrates the flavor for a thicker and much more flavorful sauce. Better than slow cooking all day as the roasting caramelizes the natural sugars. This thick tomato sauce makes a great quick meal all by itself or combined with mushrooms and vegetables for a marinara sauce over pasta. with a little fresh grated parmesan cheese. It also makes a great pizza sauce or base for a rich and creamy tomato-basil soup.
In the past I have been packing my sauce in plastic freezer containers. Once frozen I would pop out the frozen sauce and put in Foodsaver vacuum bags for long term storage in my deep freezer. This has worked very well but vacuum bags are expensive and cannot be reused.
Now I am canning my sauce using the water-bath process in pint jars and trying to reduce my use of disposable plastic vacuum bags. I also needed to save space in my small chest freezer. I added 1/4 tsp Citric acid to each pint jar to increase the acid level for water bath canning safety. I processed 35 minutes for pint jars. and set on a rack to cool.
Fresh picked ripe tomatoes are generally considered a high acid fruit with average pH of 4.54 (range 4.42-4.65) - according to a commercial food industry resource. Your pH can vary due to ripeness, fruit variety, ...etc.
*Always follow:
USDA SAFE FOOD PROCESSING RULES