Okay, maybe a silly question, but I am looking for recipes for tomato sauce. Not pasta sauce, not spaghetti sauce, but the stuff that comes in the little 8oz cans that’s basically just tomatoes and salt! We use a ton of it in different recipes and I’d love to be able to make my own, but when I try to look it up I only get recipes for pasta sauce!!
I’m sure it’s not that hard, but I know the texture has to be just right (to a certain extent) for it to work in other recipes. Has anyone made their own tomato sauce/have any tried and true recipes? Please share your wisdom 🙏
Edit: This stuff below, different from tomato paste, but very similar!
You must log in or register to comment.
We grow a lot of our own. Especially tomatoes. We just cook em down with some salt and sometimes white wine, garlic and basil and put them through the food mill to remove seeds and skins. Cook them until they thicken to a consistency you like on a slow simmer in a wide mouth pot. Then we ‘can’ them as we would tomatoes so we can use them year round. You could also freeze for storage if that’s easier for you.
This is what I was hoping to do as well! I was just worried that I would get the consistency wrong for the recipes I like. Like, I know tomato puree is very similar to tomato sauce aside from how watery it is, which can make an impact on a recipe if you get it wrong
It’s all in the cook time and having a good pot when it comes to consistency. The good pot is key with tomatoes because they burn so easily when thickening. Many will say to remove as much water as you can first but you don’t want to do this because that’s where lots of nutrients and flavor come from. A slow cook is much better. As another poster suggested it is the same as making tomato paste just a different consistency. I usually roast everything first as well as is my habit from professional kitchens.
I never tasted tomato sauce from cans because that is not a thing where I live, but here’s how I prepare homemade tomato sauce.
First you need to pick the right tomatoes:
Where I live the bottom ones are called “Roman” or “crawling” tomatoes. They’re oblong. Pick those, the “salad tomatoes” on the top are not sauce material. I use 2kg (4lb) each time.Peel them with boiling water. Discard the skins. Then open the tomatoes and chop them coarsely, reserving that “slime” full of seeds. Strain the “slime” so you get rid of the seeds (discard them); reserve a cup of the strained liquid, and blend the rest alongside the flesh. No seeds - just discard them.
Now get a large enough pot. Put the blended flesh there. Add some salt and ground pepper. (Some people like red pepper flakes here; your choice, I personally don’t.) Simmer until you got 1L of sauce (~half? volume), stirring occasionally. LOW FIRE. It should take less than a hour. You want it a bit thicker than the desired final consistency.
Turn off the fire. While the sauce is still hot add that strained cup of tomato “slime” reserved in an earlier step. (That’s why I told you to make the sauce thicker than the desired final consistency.)
Taste the sauce. If it’s too sour, add a bit of sugar. If it lacks that “whoosh” from tomato sauce, a dash of MSG. Adjust the salt if necessary.
For reference this is the basic sauce that I use in sauce-heavy pizze, like cheese pizza. It works wonders. You can also convert into a pasta sauce with garlic, onion, basil, olive oil. It freezes really well and it should last more than a month in the freezer (I don’t know the spoiling time because… well, people use it like water here.
Cooks Country/America’s Test Kitchen almost always has a recipe, especially for foundational stuff. I wouldn’t use them for Asian or Cajun (though they do provide insight with those recipes).
Buy their cookbook, it’s about $20 new, you should be able to find one in a used book store/online, for $5. Many great recipes, and a LOT of insight into why each recipe works (insight you can use for other recipes).
This is amazing, thank you! I will have to look into that book…
I give it as a gift to young adults who are moving out on their own.
I feel like pretty much everyone should have one as a start. Things like Joy of Cooking are more advanced (though still foundational, curiously). ATK takes a training-wheels approach.
The ATK/Cooks Country show has been on since the mid-90’s (and feels like it, truly a PBS show from the 90’s, haha) and does a great job explaining stuff.
Also Alton Brown’s Good Eats is great for showing how and why things work the way they do in the kitchen. Not sure how much of wither is on YouTube, there’s some.
I also recommend J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Food Lab”. It’s less of a recipe book and more of a how and why you cook book that happens to contain recipes. It’s sort of a mix of ATK and Good Eats.
The stuff in little cans is tomato paste, not tomato sauce. Maybe if you search that name you’ll get better results
No, that’s a 6oz can. Slightly taller and narrower than the sauce OP means. Really only different in H20 content tho
Look up tomato paste recipes: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-make-tomato-paste/
Unfortunately, tomato paste and tomato sauce are not the same thing. I know you can make tomato sauce from tomato paste, but that feels like a pretty roundabout way of doing things. Could be a somewhere to start though as a last resort 🤔
Well tomato sauce is both pasta sauce or pizza sauce. They are just used differently. Some variations come from personal preference and what not but ultimately they are about the same.
Best I can recommend would be look up multiple recipes, find the common ingredients/preparation methods used in every tomato sauce and pick the ones that apply to how you want it to taste.
Don’t want to use herbs or sugar? That’s totally fine. That’s you cooking.
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear on my question. It is confusing, which is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe! But I’m looking for this stuff, which isn’t pasta sauce, it’s just an ingredient in a sauce or recipe. You use it for a lot of different recipes that aren’t pasta/pizza related, which is why it’s much more simple, basically just tomatoes and salt. I’m sure this is at least a little wrong, but I think of tomato paste, tomato sauce, and tomato puree as sort of the same thing on different spots on the continuum of texture with tomato paste being the driest, tomato sauce in the middle, and tomato puree being the wateriest. Hope that clears it up!
It sounds like what you want is tomato paste that has not been reduced as long. Follow the same recipe but stop at the texture you desire
oven-baked jambalaya
andouille sausage chicken white rice tomato sauce 3 bay leaves diced tomatoes diced chiles seasoning - salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, onion, thyme, celery seed, oregano chicken stock/bouillon
9x13 dish bake until browned on top and corners
obviously not traditional but good if you need quick and easy
