For most people, August means last minute camping trips, getting ready for back to school, and soaking up the last of those summer rays. For an Italian, it means tomato sauce! For many Italian families, tomato sauce canning is done on a large scale, but it's something that anyone can do at home on a smaller scale just as well. Today's post will show how to do the large scale method, and my NEXT POST will show a smaller scale version. Click the title of this post or the "read more" link below to find out how my family does it. |
I remember making tomato sauce with my parents as a kid. I also remember hating it! It really is a full day, (often multi-day) undertaking and it can be tedious. However, now that I'm all about eating as close to the Earth as possible, it doesn't seem like quite the onerous task. In fact, it's actually kind of satisfying. And the sauce of course, is amazing.
I spent the day helping my parents make a big batch of sauce, and of course, theirs is a large-scale operation. They do bushels of tomatoes at a time, use massive pots, and of course, an electric tomato grinder.
I'll show you the pictures for that method below, but of course not everyone is going to need to make that much sauce. And not everyone has an electric tomato grinder (or any grinder for that matter), and they don't have the luxury of a second kitchen to cook these massive pots.
So, after I show you the large-scale operation, I'll be sure to show you how you can make your own sauce at home using a regular size pot and NO tomato grinder. I'll post about the smaller-scale method in my next post.
Canning Tomato Sauce (by way of my Italian parents) Ingredients:
Other needed Materials:
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This sauce is ready to use as is. You can simply open the sauce, add it to your favourite dish, and voilá!
However, my family prefers to re-cook the sauce at a later date and add in meat, onions, and extra seasonings depending on the meal.
To do that we:
- sauté onions in a pot
- add meat (ground beef, chicken, pork, meatballs, stewbeef, etc.)
- brown the meat
- Add in a jar of sauce
- Add in a little bit of salt, pepper, oregano and thyme.
- Bring to a boil and then simmer for a couple of hours. The sauce will be very flavourful and then we add it to whatever pasta dish we might be making.