Many years ago my lovely Irish husband and I went to cookery school in Italy. It was a fantastic trip and one of the best things to come out of it was the tomato sauce recipe that follows. We use it for everything from pizza topping to pasta and, with the addition of a little water, it also makes a hearty soup.
This recipe takes five minutes to pull together and another half-hour to cook. It smells divine, tastes great and is good for you (unlike most of those jars at the grocery store). If you want to make it complicated, by all means add diced carrots, sausage, red pepper flakes, and Italian herbs like oregano, marjoram and parsley. Me? I like it simple and delicious. You will too. Enjoy!
Quick and Easy Tomato Sauce
(Serves six as a pasta sauce)
4 tbsp good olive oil
1 onion, chopped finely (1/2 cup)
1 kg of tinned tomato pieces in their liquid
garlic, minced, to taste (1 tblsp)
handful of fresh basil, shredded or chopped
sugar to taste
salt and pepper to taste
Directions
1. Put the olive oil and onions into a big pot and sauté until the onions become translucent.
2. Add the next four ingredients and simmer uncovered for about 30 minutes or until it is reduced and concentrated by about
one-third.
3. Salt and pepper to taste.
Hi Kim! Quick question regarding the tomato sauce, can you store it in jars using the preserving method if I make a big batch? xoxo Soph
Hi Soph. So sorry it’s taken me a while to write back. Absolutely you can “can” the tomato sauce using the preserving method I wrote about in the “Peach Butter” blog. In fact, I canned several jars of the tomato sauce recently and they turned out wonderfully. The only difference in the canning process is I set the jars to boil for one hour (rather than the 10 minutes required for the Peach Butter) and that was primarily because of the altitude we are at but also because you are meant to boil the jars for a longer period when working with tomatoes. Two good websites to check-out for canning are http://www.simplycanning.com and http://www.pickyourown.org. Have fun and let me know how your sauce works out!
[…] (pureed tomatoes) for a creamier consistency – and cook for a further 5 minutes. (You can also make your own tomato sauce if you prefer.) Add rosemary and more parsley and pepper […]
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