…and no good recipe for how to make them into a good base tomato sauce for pasta. Almost everything I find requires canned tomatoes, or is for a fresh or barely-cooked tomato sauce. What I would ideally like to have at the end of this is a marinara-type sauce that I can freeze up and then add stuff too later (like meatballs, or a bunch of veggies and ground beef), but would be fine on its own as well. I’m googling around a bit, but I figured I’d ask here too–there have to be some good chefs who have an old standby recipe for massive amounts of garden tomatoes. My in-laws brought them over in a garbage bag, that’s how many there are.
No need for a complex recipe. Fry up a little garlic and a chopped onion in olive oil. Add tomatoes. Turn down the heat and wait, stirring occasionally. Add some salt and pepper as well as basil and oregano, if you please. You can decide when it’s thick enough for your liking, or whether you’d like to sieve out the seeds (or remove them before tossing in the tomatoes).
Bear in mind that there are “sauce” tomatoes and most garden tomatoes are not of that variety. Sauce tomatoes (typically Roma styles, but there are others as well) are a little thicker and starchier than non-sauce tomatoes, and sauce made with standard tomatoes isn’t going to be exactly like the kind of tomato sauce you’re used to.
That said, you can make sauce from non-sauce tomatoes. It’ll just be less homogenized than sauce made with the saucy tomatoes - in the worst case, you get tomato solids in a somewhat watery broth. Sometimes a little tomato paste helps with that. But pretty much just do what Cat Fight says - fry up garlic, onions, bell peppers, whatever you like. Add tomatoes. Maybe add some red wine and the aforementioned tomato paste. Salt/pepper/spices. It’ll be good, just not what you’re used to as far as consistency if you’re used to using canned tomatoes.
I’d seed them before making the sauce. That many seeds makes a bitter sauce.
I just did this last night. I had to chop down all of my plants over the weekend because of the late season blight here in the northeast. I lost probably 20 pounds of fruit.
The only thing I’d add to what’s been said already is think about a stick blender. If I had it to do again, I’d cook the tomatoes a little on their own-no garlic or onions-to soften, then stick blend, then do the garlic, onion olive oil saute and add the blended tomatoes, basil, whatnot.
Stick blender lets you monitor consistency so you don’t end up with just tomato puree. I didn’t blend until after the garlic and onions were in, ended with a less chunky sauce than I usually like.
Yeah, get rid of the seeds.
This recipe calls for canned tomatoes, but I’ve done it with fresh 'maters plenty of times.
Conversion for fresh to canned tomatoes, according to Fine Cooking, is 10-12 whole peeled tomatoes (~2lbs) for each 28 oz can of tomatoes.
Fellow sauce maker here.
I’ve always used caned crushed tomatoes myself.
Is the hassle of using fresh tomatoes, (with the boiling and the peeling) really worth the effort? (Taste wise?)
As to the OP; Cat Fight nailed it in the first post. You can’t go wrong there. Although fresh basil is a must for me.
Not for me. I like canned tomatoes in sauce just fine. Then again, I never made sauce with real sauce tomatoes, just the extras from my garden, and though it was good, I like the canned tomato sauce better.
I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, but it’s pretty much the only way I’m using a trash bag full of tomatoes.
Gonna give it a shot tonight. We’ll see how it goes.
We grow heaps of our own tomatoes. None of that difficult stuff in preparation to freeze, though. We cut them - no peeling, seeds included, simmer them a bit and freeze in plastic boxes (used to use bags, but they can get immersed in each other when they freeze, but they work fine). They are stacked in the freezer. Just tomato. Nothing else. I then use them according to the recipe I want to make, defrosting a box at a time. The peel just adds a bit of fiber.
I do that every year and don’t know what I would do without my stack of tomato mush so readily available. And yes, the taste is MUCH better.