Tomato Sauce Marathon

I mentioned in one of my posts last week, that I had three boxes of organic tomatoes, Early Girl, that I purchased at the Great Basin Food Coop. On Friday, I got busy making tomato sauce for freezing. I used recipes in a article by Georgeanne Brennan that were in her article, “From Vine to Freezer - Tomato Sauce for All Year,” which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last July. I decide to take on all three recipes, Basic Tomato Sauce, Roasted Roma Sauce, and Roasted Heirloom Tomato Sauce.

I began with the first one, which I cooked last week, with tomatoes from our garden. I sliced about twenty pounds of Early Girls, which filled the sixteen quart stock pot that Vicki gave me for my birthday. They cooked on medium for about two hours, then I ran them through the food mill.

Then I tackled the roasted roma sauce, which used my entire twenty-pound box of romas. They were sliced, then baked with olives, capers, marjoram and anchovies—the secret ingredient. After baking in the oven for about 2 1/2 hours, I pureed the sauce in the food processor, leaving it slightly chunky. The result was a piquant sauce that will make the perfect base for puttanesca sauce.

Roasted heirlooms with the next challenge, Cherokee Black and Brandywine tomatoes, oven roasted with olives, fresh basil, spices, balsamic vinegar, then simmered with white wine. This was also run through the food mill, yielding a dark rich sauce that will be superb with pasta, fish, or roasted vegetables.

I did most of this in one day, the kitchen was roasting, probably 100 degrees and floor was a mess and there seemed to be tomato residue everywhere. Still, the results were fabulous, I've put 60+ twelve-ounce bags of sauce in the freezer.