Making Tomato Sauce

What to do with all these Celebrity tomatoes? We love tomatoes, but even we can't eat this many before they go bad, so we made up some tasty tomato sauce and canned it up for later use!



Celebrity tomatoes are excellent for making tomato sauce, because they contain a lot of pulp and very few seeds.



We borrowed a food strainer contraption from Ian's mom, quartered the tomatoes and ran them through the machine twice.



The tomatoes go in the top.



As you turn the crank, the juice and pulp come out the bottom and the seeds and skins come out the side. You can run the seeds and skins through a second time to try and extract more juice and pulp.



It's a really handy machine and easy to use. You can also use it to make apple sauce.



Here is the juice and pulp from 20 Celebrity tomatoes. We were surprised by how pink the juice was and by how much sauce 20 tomatoes made!



Once you add the red wine and let it simmer for several hours, the color turns much darker red and it cooks down by about 25% of the original volume. You can add some tomato paste to keep it from reducing as much.



We added basil and oregano from the garden, peppers from the garden, mushrooms, red wine, garlic and bay leaves. We let the pot simmer on low for a good four hours to get a nice thick sauce.



We had some sauce for dinner that night, then canned up the rest. Mmmm! It's so good. 20 Celebrity tomatoes made 5 pints of sauce.



We have many more tomatoes ripening in the garden, and we will be canning up more sauce this weekend!