Patti Elwell is an avid gardener and cook who has been a frequent speaker at garden clubs.
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Posted on: 08-2022
I started making this roasted tomato sauce years ago when my gardening skills had improved and I was having an abundance of tomatoes every year. I would always freeze tomatoes roasted with garlic, to be able to savor that summer flavor in winter, but struggled with making sauce. The course I had taken in canning had me seriously concerned about the level of acidity of the varieties of tomatoes I was growing and the safety of my end product and I despised all the work of skinning and seeding the tomatoes. I decided if I could freeze my roasted tomatoes, I could easily freeze a similarly produced sauce. This simple roasted tomato sauce quickly became a family favorite.
ServingsMakes approx. 9-10 cups.
Ingredients
15 cloves of garlic, peeled
3.6-4.5 Kg (8-10 lbs) any variety of tomatoes (except cherries), meaty are best, all cored (stem section out), quartered
1.3-1.8 Kg (3-4 lbs) medium onions, skin removed and quartered
.5 Kg (1 lb) chopped carrots (optional, but they add sweetness to allow for elimination or reduction of added sugar)
Other optional chopped vegetables to your taste: sweet peppers, mushrooms
118 ml (½ cup) dried Italian seasoning herbs or 237 ml (1 cup) fresh, chopped herbs (rosemary, basil, oregano, thyme)
59 ml (1/4 cup) olive oil
118-237 ml (½ - 1 cup) red wine (optional)
Salt and pepper
59 ml (1/4 cup) sugar (optional, but helps cut acidity if you don’t add carrots)
1. Preheat oven to 232°C (450°F). Lightly grease a large roasting pan, add and gently stir all the ingredients except for salt, pepper and sugar, and place in oven.
2. Roast for approximately 1 ½ hours, stirring every half hour. Vegetables will char. After cooking down the sauce, leave it chunky or use a stick blender (preferred) right in the pan to puree all ingredients. Taste the sauce and add up to 59 ml (¼ cup) of sugar, and salt and pepper to your taste. Freezes for up to 8 months.
Patti Elwell is an avid gardener and cook. She is a former marketing manager now seasonally employed at Rolling Green Nursery in Greenland NH, and is a frequent speaker at garden clubs, providing programs about seed starting and growing vegetables, raised bed gardening, growing sprouts and preserving herbs.