How Do I Make and Preserve Tomato Sauce? Good Questions

Q: We're having a bumper crop of tomatoes here in the Northwest this year. In years past we've canned diced tomatoes for use throughout the year, but this year we thought we would like try making and canning our own tomato sauce.

Can you make any suggestions of recipes for the tomato sauce and any suggestions for preserving?

Sent by Matt

Editor: Thanks for the question, Matt! Tomato sauce is one of the first things that many people can, and it's responsible for getting lots of people into preserving. Remember this guy who canned 1000 tomatoes?

Making tomato sauce is really, really easy, and canning tomatoes isn't much harder. Also, you don't have to even can tomato sauce; if you have freezer space you can freeze it instead. Here are a few recipes from the site, and some resources for canning information.

• Basic Tomato Sauce (with Optional Zing!)
• Basic Tomato Sauce
• Heat Wave Eating: No-Cook Tomato Sauce

Here are some other resources on tomato sauce and tomato preserving.

• Making quick tomato sauce, ever so slowly at A Way To Garden, and part of Summer Fest.
• Canning Tomatoes and Tomato Products at the National Center for Home Food Preservation

Readers, do you preserve tomato sauce, through canning or freezing, and do you have good advice for Matt?

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(Image: Faith Durand)

Comments (4)

My hubby and I usually freeze the tomato pulp. I highly recommend you invest in a food mill - or tomato mill - they have a cheap one at William Sonoma (Less than $30 which is cheap for WS!) that works great for tomatoes. It removes the skins and seeds so you can just store the pulp for sauce. It is invaluable for large batches of canning/freezing. You run the tomatoes through 2-3 times to get all the pulp out but it goes fast and is much easier than trying to remove skins by hand.

I wish we were having a bumper crop this year. seems like everyone's lost theirs (including us) to blight this year in the Boston area.

I've been doing tomatoes for years now without a mill - it is not that difficult. But I just bought the mill from LeeValley.com because it should make things go even more quickly.

Tomatoes are just starting to appear at local markets here in Ottawa, so it will be another week or two before I start into it

Here is the pasta sauce we did last year
http://www.urbanhippy.ca/node/45

And one of the batches of ketchup
http://www.urbanhippy.ca/node/43

If you are just doing canned tomatoes, you can process in a boiling water bath. Pasta sauce and anything else but 100% tomato must be pressure canned. READ A BOOK!!!

I'll be doing a better tomato article this year along with a video - but as mentioned that is a few weeks away yet. Basically you process the tomatoes by plunging each one into boiling water for a minute or two. Take it out, remove the skin, then open it and with your finger just scoop the seeds and watery stuff out of each of the chambers in there, and discard that stuff. Keep the pulpy part. We'll see how much quicker it goes this year with the mill.

Then all the fleshy stuff goes into a pot and gets boiled. For just plain canned tomatoes you only have to boil 20 or 30 minutes before putting into the jars to can.

anyone ever done fire roasted tomatoes and preserved them? i usually buy them from Muir Glen, but i'd really like to do them myself. they have such a great flavor.

My mom halves her tomatoes, tops with some garlic, olive oil, s p, basil and roasts until they're done. Then she freezes them in serving size portions in zip bags on cookie trays so they freeze flat. I prefer this method to tomato sauce. You can just defrost and use instead of sauce in lasagna, on pasta, etc etc. SO delicious.