It's a well known fact that with successful gardening comes a large harvest, and the best way to preserve all your hard work is to, well... preserve it! Our Operations Manager, Lorrie, decided to freeze her wealthy tomato harvest this past summer in preparation for making large batches of homemade marinara sauce!
She froze the blanched and skinned tomatoes in gallon freezer bags; defrosting about 30 lbs of them for this recipe. Makes about 25 cups of sauce.
INGREDIENTS:
30 lbs frozen tomatoes, defrosted and drained
8 whole bulbs of garlic, peeled and separated into cloves
4 medium onions, roughly chopped
1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup dried parsley (or 1 1/2 cups fresh parsley)
1/3 cup dried oregano (or 1 cup fresh oregano)
3 TBSP dried basil (or a heavy 1/2 cup of fresh basil)
2 whole carrots, peeled and grated
1 TBSP sugar
Salt & pepper to taste (we used 3 TSP salt, 1/2 TSP pepper)
1. Place your 30 lbs of defrosted tomatoes in a large stock pot and set on medium/high heat.
2. Cook your tomatoes down until most of the water has cooked away. The tomatoes will turn a rich red color and, when you stir them, the tomatoes will coat your spoon. This process took several hours for us, so fear not if it takes a while! This is something you can set on the stove to cook while you're doing something else in the kitchen. Just be sure to stir them periodically.
3. A quick way to peel cloves of garlic is to smash them with the flat edge of a large knife. Peel all your garlic and set the cloves aside.
4. Peel and roughly chop your onions and set aside.
5. Grate your two carrots finely.
6. Add your garlic and onions to the pot, as well as olive oil. Stir and allow to cook a little longer (10-15 minutes).
6. Turn off heat and allow tomato mixture to cool enough to place in a food processor. We waited about 20-30 minutes.
7. Add in the carrots and send your tomato mixture through your food processor until it becomes velvety in texture.
8. We added our dried herbs after the tomatoes had already been processed, but you can add them before processing if you prefer.
9. Add sugar then salt and pepper to taste.
10. We chose to freeze our finished sauce in freezer-specific plastic containers, as it will be used fairly quickly. This recipe made about 25 cups of sauce. You can also can your sauce (check out our post on canning here). Now enjoy your sauce all winter long!
This looks delish!! Brings to mind something I read a long time ago on Organic Gardening… a tip to cook tomatoes ‘down’, then let them sit overnight. The liquid will have separated from the solids and can be poured off (and drunk, or used as a stock in other recipes). Saves time and stirring in boiling the liquid off. Then cook the sauce with the rest of the ingredients to desired doneness.
Enjoy the seeds. Would love a printout of the recipe so I can make the sauce without the fuss of running to the computer while I’m trying to cook. Thanks! It’s a lovely idea to include recipes.
I like the idea of freezing tomatoes as they ripen so that sauce can be made months later when I have time. I just marked my fall calendar to do this since I am often overwhelmed with everything ripening at once, trying to deal with all of it in a real life way. Maybe I can avoid waste with this idea.
Sounds delicious… I can smell it already! The addition of carrots was an interesting surprise. I would then omit the sugar. Since i am a fan of fennel, i would add a little of that…plus a few flakes of red pepper (for a gentle kick)
i ad my voice to the request for print out.