Friday, August 29, 2008

making red sauce

sauce 1 sauce 2
sauce 3 sauce 4
sauce 5 sauce 6
sauce 7 sauce 9
sauce 10 sauce 11

With four big bowls full of ripe tomatoes on my counter, last night I made up a quick red sauce. This was the real quick version. Just chop, cook, remove skins, then freeze. Oh, and lick out the pan - it was VERY tasty! I think the mix of so many varieties made it taste so good.

tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum)
Skippy's vegetable recipes

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

What happens between the picture where you have the colander full of tomato muck and the empty colander?

Michelle @ Give a Girl a Fig said...

This sauce looks rich and delicious!

kathy said...

Well, I used my salad colander to let the liquid drain a bit from the sauce so I could pull out the tomato skins better. After I spent 15 minutes or so sorting through and removing skin, I added the pulp back to the sauce.

(Lets not call it muck...)

Normally I would have peeled and seeded the tomatoes ahead of time, but I was tried a different approach here. Maybe less conventional, but it seemed to work OK.

Anonymous said...

Of course not muck...

How about: Concentrated cooking and flavor gold!

I was wondering about the seed part. Some people swear by having to get all of the seeds out and that just seemed too fussy and labor intensive to me. I'm an...ah...lazy cooker.

Garden Lily said...

Wow, looks so easy, and so rich - makes me hungry at 10:30pm!! I've never had enough ripe tomatoes to cook anything, but made a great green tomato relish one year. ;-)

Garden Lily

kathy said...

Yes, the best is to peel and seed. I totally agree. But sometimes you do what you have time and energy for.

Peel after scalding in boiling water or roasting on a flame. Seed by hand. Then cook down and you'll get sauce perfection.

I also have a nice "tomato machine" - a hand crank tool where the seeds and skins come out one end and the pulp the other. Great also. Makes a very smooth sauce.

I like to experiment with different methods. Each sauce has its own character.

Joe said...

Do you use heirloom tomatoes in your sauces? Do they taste good in a sauce with regular tomatoes?

kathy said...

YES Lots of heirlooms in the sauce. Especially Purple Calabash, San Marzano! Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Giant Belgian, the more the better ... Delicious.