Homemade Tomato Sauce Recipe

French Mother Sauce ” Tomato Sauce“

When making a quality, yet basic homemade tomato sauce the key is to buy the best tomatoes you can find. Might sound obvious, but it can be overlooked. Making the best tomato sauce of the season takes place during the latter part of the year.

Fun idea, the next time you decide to make more homemade tomato sauce check out one of the farmer’s markets in your area. Connecting with our food is just plain fun and we get a special sense of pride knowing we did the best we could. Let’s talk about some tomato facts and health benefits.

45 Types Of Tomatoes | A-to-Z | Defined | Photos

Beautiful aren’t they? These are organic greenhouse vine ripped tomatoes. Have you ever wondered why they ripen on the vine? From the moment they are picked they start to denature. This is when the tomatoes start to give off nitrogen and age. This is a good thing 🙂 As this process is happening the tomatoes are actually getting sweeter through the process. Just like with bananas sitting out on the counter and turning the darker color on the peel. Or when Avocados, from the grocery, is hard as a rock, but in a short few days, they’re perfect. As cooks, we all want to make the best food we can. With denaturing in mind this gives us additional Cheffing powers with our food creations. In the case of tomatoes, be sure to buy the tomatoes a few days before you’re ready to make your next batch of homemade tomato sauce and let them sit on the corner. They will get sweeter by the day. Cool, right?

Which is it? Are Tomatoes a Fruit or a Vegetable?

So what’s the real difference between fruits and vegetables? Which is which?

In short, fruits have seeds

The way botanists see it, a fruit is an entity that develops from the fertilized ovary of a flower. Ok? This means that tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, corn kernels, and beans and pea pods are all fruits; so are apples, pears, peaches, apricots, melons, and mangos.

Vegetables, botanically, are any edible part of a plant that doesn’t happen to be a fruit, as in leaves (spinach, lettuce, cabbage), roots (carrots, beets, turnips), stems (asparagus), tubers (potatoes), bulbs (onions), and flowers (cauliflower and broccoli).

Culturally speaking the world over calls tomatoes both a fruit and a vegetable.

Could you imagine being on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and getting the question, “Are tomatoes a fruit or vegetable? and whichever answer you gave they call it wrong…The subject of “Are tomatoes fruit or vegetable” is still open for discussion.

When trying to eat healthy here’s a little tip to top health. Brighter fruits and vegetables equal really strong health properties, and red happens to one of the very tops in this line of thinking. The homemade tomato sauce we are making today is simple, yet very on-point in flavor and with respect to our ingredients.  Ok, we got it, great ingredients; but there is always more to the story. We cannot forget about our good friend “technique“.

Tomatoes offer a wide range of health benefits, one being weight loss. A pretty good little piece of food knowledge to know. The list goes on.  We hear a lot about flavonoids and antioxidants being able to neutralize harmful free radicals in the body. Lycopene shows up in a big way in tomatoes. This flavonoid antioxidant has the ability to protect the cells even as it protects the skin from ultraviolet damage, and as a possible result, skin cancer.

Making Homemade Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

• Organic Tomatoes if you can find them
• Vidalia Onion / Spanish Onion / 1015 Onion
• Parsley / Basil / Oregano
• Sea Salt

Watch Our Video How-To Video Below:

https://youtu.be/-kqDfcJuvHI

Culinary Fact About Vidalia Onions:

I’m going to guess some of you may not have heard of a “1015 onion”.

One day you’ll be in a restaurant reading the menu and see the recipe title using “1015 onion”. So what does it mean?

The 1015 Texas Sweet Onion is considered the sweetest onion in the world and has the nickname of the million-dollar onion from the cost associated with the college A&M’s time and money spent on development.

The reason they are called 1015 is they have to be planted before October 15th each year to be ready for the spring harvest.

Tomato Preparation

You will want to remove the skins from the tomatoes. This could be a nightmare with poor technique. No worries. To remove the skins from the tomatoes boil some water and also cut an “X” in the bottom of all the tomatoes. At (Opposite end of the tomato the vine was attached.  Add the tomatoes to the boiling water and wait about 90 seconds. Yep, that quick, and the skins will be pulling back on themselves. Makes for super easy skin removal.

From there, dice half of one large onion and add it to a pot over medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil (helps the butter not burn)

Sweat the onions for a few minutes, until they start to release their water. When the onions start to take on a little color add in the tomatoes and crush them up in the pot. You could squeeze them in your hands as you add them to the pot. Cook the onions and tomatoes for about 15 minutes.

What we are making is a homemade tomato sauce ‘Base”.  The idea is not to add a bunch of flavors to the sauce. Why not? The reason is the sauce becomes way more valuable in your choices of use. If the sauce is already flavored you will be limited in its uses. Just add the flavors you want when using the tomato sauce and tailor it to your needs.

Adding Flavor

You could add oregano, parsley, basil, a pinch of sugar. Before you start cooking the onions add some red wine to the pot and reduce by a little bit more than half. Adds great flavor. Another thing to consider is color. The homemade tomato sauce “Base” we are making will have more of a lighter color. The reason is when we blender the sauce into a smooth sauce bit of air gets incorporated. Lightens the color. If you decide to cook the tomato sauce for a long period of time the sauce will start to darken for you. The reason is the tomatoes start to gain a dark deep color from the natural sugars in the tomatoes as they start caramelizing.

Adding in tomato paste also helps achieve the dark color much quicker, and a more robust flavor profile.