It took a while, and I had to pause part way through to do other things, but it’s finally done!
Here are photos of the process. I didn’t really follow a recipe, but rather used a number of different recipes I found online to use as a guide.
After selecting the ripest Roma VF tomatoes, I gave them a wash and left them in the water while working on the onions and garlic. I wanted those on the bottom of the roasting pans to make sure they would get completely immersed in any liquid released by the tomatoes. I wanted them to cook until they were so soft, they’d disappear into the sauce.
When it came time to process the tomatoes, things went a lot faster than fighting with those little onions and garlic! I was going to leave the skins on, so I only needed to cut the stem ends off (and any damaged bits), then give them a squeeze. With the shape of the Roma, it was easy to do it sort of assembly line style, cutting the ends off and lining them up on the cutting board, cut side down, until the board was mostly full, then squeezing the seeds out into a bucket for the compost.
A handy tip to make things easier: place a cutting board inside a baking pan with low sides. I have a whole bunch of 9×13 baking pans that are perfect for this. They are large enough to fit a cutting board with room to spare to catch liquids or keep items handy, and the sides are low enough to not get in the way of my hand or the knife as I cut.
All the recipes I found had the amount of tomatoes by weight – usually 4 lbs. I had no idea how many pounds of tomatoes I had, so I just winged the quantities for the other ingredients, and split everything between the three pans.
After all the tomatoes were cut and seeded, I added more olive oil and carefully turned the tomatoes to coat them, while trying not to move the onions and garlic on the bottom too much.
The recipes I found had oven temperatures ranging from 300F to 425F, and while some had cooking times, most were “until the skins start to blister”.
I decided to go lower and slower. I put the three roasting pans into a 325F oven. I checked them at about 40 minutes, then added another half an hour.
While they were roasting, I went and got some fresh oregano and thyme. I didn’t get a lot of oregano, because the plant is mostly blooming right now, and the bees were loving the flowers. So I just found a few smaller stems. I picked about the same amount of the thyme sharing a pot with the oregano. We have German Winter Thyme in the old kitchen garden, but the seed pack for these ones didn’t include a variety name.
This gave me a chance to try out the herb chopper I picked up at a Dollarama not long ago. It came with a cutting board with a recess matching the curve of the blades. It did a pretty good job, though with the slightly larger oregano leaves, they sort of got caught between the blades while just rocking it, so it needed to be lifted and shifted with each cut. That was not as much of an issue with the thyme leaves.
I like it.
When the timer went off on the oven, the kitchen needed to be used for other cooking, so I just shut it off and left the pans in the oven. Then, before I started on the final cooking, I made sure to do all my outside stuff and other little things, so they were in the oven for probably 2 or 3 hours. They were still quite warm when I took them out!
When transferring them into my big stock pot, I was very happy to see how softened the onions and garlic were! Exactly what I was after. All three roasting pans really filled that pot!
At this point, I added the chopped herbs and salt. Sea salt, because we happen to have some at the moment. After stirring that in, I turned on the heat, then used the immersion blender on it. Not for long, but that things is very efficient, so there were just a few larger pieces that got missed.
After that, I kept it at a simmer for about another couple of hours, stirring frequently. I tasted it a few times and ended up adding more salt (twice), some pepper, some dried sage, a bay leaf and a splash of lemon juice.
Towards the end, I removed the bay leaf and took the immersion blender to it again. This time I kept it going for longer, so make sure there weren’t any big pieces of tomato skins anywhere.
I like that this pot has a measurement scale inside it. After the first blending, the sauce reached just under the 7L mark. When it was done, it was at the 6L mark. I could have cooked it down further, but I think it’ll be good enough.
For now, the sauce is cooling down. I plan to put it into freezer bags and freeze them, though we will probably use some of it with a meal, first.
I think the next processing I will do is to dehydrate slices of the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes. Those can be left in a warm oven, unattended, while I get other work done.
A dehydrator would be a useful gadget, but we really don’t have the space for one. At least not where we also have access to an outlet.
For now, the oven will do just fine, and tomorrow, I hope to get some work done outside at the same time!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 