Help - I have more tomatoes than I can shake a stick at!
I have seen some of the passata methods, but, not having a pressure cooker feel a bit stumped as to where to start.
...all I need is a basic receipe for tomatoes, not too fancy, for making a sauce that I can freeze for use in pasta dishes/chilli etc.
NB : The bulk of my toms are plum & beef - some of the beef have greenback.
Help!!
what a great problem to have lol
the basic sauce without a pressure cooker, suitable for freezing? :)
Wash tomatoes - any and all sorts can go in, including green/cream/blue/black ones :o
Discard any damaged, slugged or mouldy bits, but greenback will be fine
Chop roughly and put in a heavy bottomed pan
Slowly bring to the boil, then simmer until thick and reduced in volume to about half the original
Stir from time to time to prevent the toms catching on the bottom of the pan
Seive, squidge or liquidise
Freeze in useable portions
This concentrated sauce from your home grown toms will be so good you probably won't need salt or sugar when it comes to making up pasta sauce. I use it straight, with parmesan, pepper and a slug of olive oil, on pasta - mmmmmmmmm!
I've just not got any room at all in my freezer at the moment :'(
any idea how long this concentrated sauce would keep maybe in the fridge (say in jars or tupperware type containers) please?
got the tomatoes sitting here waiting to be used :(
Here's mine that I posted on another thread.
Heat some oil and add a finely chopped medium onion, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and 3 or 4 snipped-up anchovies. Cook gently for about 10 mins. Add about 2 ½ - 3 lbs skinned chopped tomatoes, some oregano, a teeny weeny bit of sugar, and black pepper. Simmer gently until reduced to a thick pulp and almost all the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat, stir in some halved cherry tomatoes so they wilt into the sauce. Dollop into freezer bags when cool.
I sometimes add chopped chillies, seeds ‘n’ all, with the onion.
The other day I came across some dried porcini mushrooms in the cupboard, so I snipped em up and stirred them into that day's batch. Twas nice.
Great recipe Supersprout - basic (a bit like me!! ;) )
Greyhounds recipe sounds nice too...not keen on anchovies though....
...well, I will give it a try and hopefully make some great tasting pasta sauce - of course all I need to do now is make tonnes more jam to use up the frozen currants to make room for the sauce!
(this is my first year on my plot [started April], and I wasn't quite prepared for the glut.....my plum tree is positively dripping in plums, even though I've harvested approx 15 Kg, I still have another 20 kg left on the tree!....my toms have gone into overdrive giving me about 8 large carrier bags full of plum toms and beef toms...and still more coming....the freezer also has about 6kg of blackcurrant, 8kg of redcurrants and 3kg of blackberries ) - at least I can use this years experience to plan my crops better next year! (hurry up Mr.Postie and deliver my seed catalogs....)
Quote from: Pigface51 on September 06, 2006, 17:13:26
...not keen on anchovies though....
Ah, so many say that, but when anchovies melt into a sauce they disappear, leaving a wonderful savoury depth of flavour that isn't the least bit fishy. Nothing like the raw naked anchovy!
Trust me and try it - just once! ;)
(Don't add salt though - there's enough saltiness in the anchovy for most peeps.)
Quote from: Hot_Potato on September 06, 2006, 15:40:48
I've just not got any room at all in my freezer at the moment :'(
any idea how long this concentrated sauce would keep maybe in the fridge (say in jars or tupperware type containers) please?
snap HP no room in freezer, that's why I started this bottling malarkey, we've got 28 litres in the cupboard and rising! :-[
The concentrated sauce will last a good week in tupperware in the fridge :D
oh piggers I wished you lived around the corner ... dripping with plums ... such envy! ;) ;D
and remember the seed swap here if you want to experiment with different varieties of this and that ::)
happy saucery :)
Pigface51, have you thought about oven drying some of your toms?
You might then be able to stick them in some oil in the fridge, and they'd last for a good couple of weeks. If you got them dry enough they might last outside, like sun-dried. If this sun keeps up like this you might be able to do a combi of sun and oven drying.
Just a suggestion, they'd take up a whole lot space with all that water dried out of em.