Canning Tomato Sauce

Happy Labor Day! Labor Day Weekend happens to be prime time for tomatoes in New England. This past week our CSA announced a special on 25lbs of beefsteak tomatoes. We decided to take advantage of the special and make tomato sauce. We had just canned tomato sauce for the first time last weekend, so we already had our process down and a few ideas for changes to our recipe from last week. Although it is quite a long process (it takes the majority of a day), making homemade tomato sauce is actually quite easy. We found the best way to peel the tomatoes is to core, score and blanching the tomatoes. This process is covered in detail in my directions below.

Materials needed:

• knives
• several large bowls
• several large pots
• small colander or large slotted spoon  
• jar funnel
• Ball jars and lids
• masher

Ingredients:

• 20lbs+ tomatoes
• 2 heads of garlic
• 2 large onions
• olive oil
• fresh basil
• dried oregano
• dried thyme
• salt + pepper
• sugar 

Instructions:

1. Wash tomatoes, mason jars and lids.
2. Core and score: Cut and pop out the cores of each tomato and score the bottoms with an X. (Core/Score process illustrated really well on this post.)While you are doing this, bring a large pot of water to a boil.
3. Prepare an ice bath by filling a large bowl with ice and cold water. (We ran out of ice so we made do with an ice pack). Blanch the tomatoes in small batches by putting several tomatoes into the boiling water and let sit for 30 - 40 seconds. Use a colander or large slotted spoon to move the tomatoes from the boiling water to the ice bath. Let tomatoes cool and peel off the skin.
4. Once all the tomatoes are peeled, you can mash the tomatoes with a hand masher.
5. Peel and mince garlic and onions. Start warming several pots with about two tablespoons of olive oil. We use several pots to distribute the sauce to reduce the time needed to boil off the excess water. Add your desired amount of garlic and onions to each pot, add salt to sweat the garlic and onions. Keep the temperature relatively low so as not to burn the garlic and onions. Once the onions are translucent, add the mashed tomatoes.
6. Turn up the heat so as to bring the sauce to a steady simmer in order to burn off the excess liquid. Add desired amounts of oregano, thyme, pepper, salt and sugar. We tend to be conservative with the salt and sugar until an hour or so has passed so as not to go by the taste of the sauce with the excess liquid. 
7. Simmer for an hour and a half or so, paying attention so as to keep a controlled simmer. Use the hand masher from time to time during the simmering process to break up the stubborn large clumps.
8. Once the sauce is closer to the desired consistency, taste the sauce and add sauce and sugar to your desired taste. Wash and chiffonade the fresh basil. We like to add the basil in closer to the end of the boiling so as to retain its fresh flavor as much as possible.
9. When sauce is at the desired consistency, use the jar funnel and pour each jar to the bottom of the neck.
10. Process. Follow instructions based upon the processing method of your choosing. I found this site to be really helpful for researching canning vs water bath processing. It is advised for tomato sauce to use pressure canning if at all possible. If you do the water bath method, you should add citric acid or lemon juice to your jars before processing. Last week we simply froze our sauce since we were only using it for ourselves.

For last weekend's batch we used Roma tomatoes and we found they yielded far more sauce and boiled quicker than the beefsteak tomatoes. In the future we will probably use Roma tomatoes whenever possible. During this batch we deseeded about 10 tomatoes for a special sauce for my husband's mother who needs to avoid seeds due to a dietary issue. We also found that by taking the time to remove the seeds, although it's a pain to do, it actually saved time during the boiling process and yielded a thicker sauce. So if you're using beefsteak tomatoes, I'd advise deseeding. When you break open the tomato you'll be pushing out the jelly-like chunks that hold the seeds, thus removing a majority of the liquid from the tomato.

I hope you found this post to be a helpful guide on canning tomato sauce. Good luck and happy canning!