Okay, maybe a silly question, but I am looking for recipes for tomato sauce. Not pasta sauce, not spaghetti sauce, but the stuff that comes in the little 8oz cans that’s basically just tomatoes and salt! We use a ton of it in different recipes and I’d love to be able to make my own, but when I try to look it up I only get recipes for pasta sauce!!
I’m sure it’s not that hard, but I know the texture has to be just right (to a certain extent) for it to work in other recipes. Has anyone made their own tomato sauce/have any tried and true recipes? Please share your wisdom 🙏
Edit: This stuff below, different from tomato paste, but very similar!
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The stuff in little cans is tomato paste, not tomato sauce. Maybe if you search that name you’ll get better results
Look up tomato paste recipes: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-make-tomato-paste/
Unfortunately, tomato paste and tomato sauce are not the same thing. I know you can make tomato sauce from tomato paste, but that feels like a pretty roundabout way of doing things. Could be a somewhere to start though as a last resort 🤔
Well tomato sauce is both pasta sauce or pizza sauce. They are just used differently. Some variations come from personal preference and what not but ultimately they are about the same.
Best I can recommend would be look up multiple recipes, find the common ingredients/preparation methods used in every tomato sauce and pick the ones that apply to how you want it to taste.
Don’t want to use herbs or sugar? That’s totally fine. That’s you cooking.
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear on my question. It is confusing, which is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe! But I’m looking for this stuff, which isn’t pasta sauce, it’s just an ingredient in a sauce or recipe. You use it for a lot of different recipes that aren’t pasta/pizza related, which is why it’s much more simple, basically just tomatoes and salt. I’m sure this is at least a little wrong, but I think of tomato paste, tomato sauce, and tomato puree as sort of the same thing on different spots on the continuum of texture with tomato paste being the driest, tomato sauce in the middle, and tomato puree being the wateriest. Hope that clears it up!
It sounds like what you want is tomato paste that has not been reduced as long. Follow the same recipe but stop at the texture you desire
I never tasted tomato sauce from cans because that is not a thing where I live, but here’s how I prepare homemade tomato sauce.
First you need to pick the right tomatoes:
Where I live the bottom ones are called “Roman” or “crawling” tomatoes. They’re oblong. Pick those, the “salad tomatoes” on the top are not sauce material. I use 2kg (4lb) each time.Peel them with boiling water. Discard the skins. Then open the tomatoes and chop them coarsely, reserving that “slime” full of seeds. Strain the “slime” so you get rid of the seeds (discard them); reserve a cup of the strained liquid, and blend the rest alongside the flesh. No seeds - just discard them.
Now get a large enough pot. Put the blended flesh there. Add some salt and ground pepper. (Some people like red pepper flakes here; your choice, I personally don’t.) Simmer until you got 1L of sauce (~half? volume), stirring occasionally. LOW FIRE. It should take less than a hour. You want it a bit thicker than the desired final consistency.
Turn off the fire. While the sauce is still hot add that strained cup of tomato “slime” reserved in an earlier step. (That’s why I told you to make the sauce thicker than the desired final consistency.)
Taste the sauce. If it’s too sour, add a bit of sugar. If it lacks that “whoosh” from tomato sauce, a dash of MSG. Adjust the salt if necessary.
For reference this is the basic sauce that I use in sauce-heavy pizze, like cheese pizza. It works wonders. You can also convert into a pasta sauce with garlic, onion, basil, olive oil. It freezes really well and it should last more than a month in the freezer (I don’t know the spoiling time because… well, people use it like water here.
This is basically how we do it. In my area, the tomatos you talk about are called Plum tomatoes.
We had growing up this cool machine that clamped to the table, you’d place the blanched tomatoes in the top and push them down into a grinder well. Out on end came all the seeds and skins, and out the grater came the sauce into a bowl. You then cook the sauce down to your desired thickness, and there you have it.
Not having the machine requires a bit more effort, but your spot on with your method here for the initial question.
