Tomato Sauce ! Soon I hope.
 

I think you're going to have at least a few days before you've got sauce. :D

It's disappointing how many tomatoes you actually need to make sauce when you have a small garden. We just froze them off the vine and I cook from frozen for same day sauce.
How do you make the sauce?

My great grandmother had a 1 acre garden and quite a lot of it grew tomatoes. I remember days like this in the summer. Pure heaven.

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I am preparing out tomato area as we speak. It's only maybe 100 SF. If needed, we will get Yakima tomatoes by the flat, which are still pretty good. About as good as the tomatoes we grow.

We mostly put tomatoes up in quart jars, but we also make marinara, salsa, etc., and put those in jars as well. It is rewarding. They say two things cannot be bought, and one of them is a garden tomato. Heirloom garden tomatoes are as different from grocery store tomatoes as turbine engines are different from an earthworms.

We process and then freeze the basil in freezer bags.

We also pickle many things. Beets, beans, carrots, etc.

We do have a small pressure canner for when we need/want to can something that requires pressure.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with "water bath" canning, it is quite easy. The hard part is getting the jars very clean and preparing/inserting the fruit or vegetable. Tomatoes, or anything pickled, contains too much acid for any critters to survive. You basically cap the jar and submerge it in boiling water for a while. Keeps on the shelf for years.

But of course, the greatest tomato joy of the year is eating them fresh. I make tomato sandwiches with three ingredients including mayonnaise. Sliced tomatoes, basil and mozzarella drizzled with olive oil......mmmmmmm.

Sounds like a caprese salad sandwich. I love tomato sauce. I'm good with pretty much any cooked tomato. I've never much cared for a raw tomato. I remember finding that I liked "grape" tomatos. But they've got to be grape, I don't even like cherry tomatoes. I keep hoping that someday I find a "regular" tomato that I like.

I've heard/read, that over the years, tomatoes have been bred to be pretty, red, uniform in size and shape, and all around, visually pleasing. In the process, no one considered flavor, so that was mostly lost. Now that we've got some land, my wife is wanting to start a garden, and I suspect we'll grow tomatoes. If so, I'll be reaching out to starless since his seem to be widely loved.

Steve, I learned to like avocados. Surely there is a good raw tomato experience in your future. There is a wide variety.

When they bred for ripeness simultaneosity (I just made that word up) they were also breeding out flavor. They did not know it at the time. Eventually, they developed hybrids that would all be ripe at the same time. The commercial part of the industry does not harvest by hand. All the tomatoes are harvested at the same time, machinially. I made that one up too.

The word you are looking for a "Heirloom." Basically means the opposite of hybrid. While hybrids are great for being ripe at the same time, heirlooms are known for their flavor. Garden heirloom tomatoes can be a transcendental experience.

We always plant a Sungold. I think it can go by other names. It's a cherry tomato that s not red. It is orange/yellow. Like little balls of sugar that explode in your mouth. GREAT on salads, cut in half.

Yep..the ROMA varieties are the better sauce tomatoes...

Yep, I'll find something eventually. In the mean time, at least I've got sauce!

It's all about the sauces. And a tomato sauce made from the right tomatoes is ... REALLY good. Tangy.

Tomatoes are actually from central america, They grow good one in Mexico. I once had a bloody mary, made from fresh tomatoes, that was almost undrinkable because it was so over-the-top tangy.

Any time we use fresh stuff for a sauce,we end up throwing maters, onion, peppers, capers, olives (black and green), artichoke hearts, maybe some asparagus tips on a baking sheet w/ olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Toss in the oven and roast for a while, and either serve right up like that or add to a pan with a little bit of canned tomato sauce and hit it for a few seconds with a hand blender/boat motor. Liquify the roasted stuff a little but leave most of it chunky.

Brother's mother who died last year Dad brought her home from Italy in WW2. When the gardens are going and the tomatoes are prime, just dice 'em and chop some garlic and add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, mix it all up and then mix into angel hair pasta. So simple and yet so good.

Zucchini goes in my marinara. It gets cooked until it disappears.

I think the secret to great food, more than anything else, is the ingredients. Start with high quality, fresh ingredients and you have the game won already. Chop them, saute them gently and eat them. Foolproof.

I agree to succeed in a recipe you just need high quality fresh ingredients

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You better start dumping miracle grow on that stuff!!

Have been eating the sun gold tomatoes and zucchini a few weeks. 4 plants of each, it is like a green Borg taking over part of the yard. There are like 20 various tomato plants total, one got frozen down to the ground and came back. Tomatillo volunteers again, about a half dozen I did not pull up are getting pretty big. 10 pepper plants, half Anaheim chili, half jalapeno, one froze pretty much to death, think it might have been one of the chilis. Butternut squash again too, seems to be running all over, like a pumpkin would, but I like to eat butternut squash.

Snap peas are coming on, and I bet I have 100 green beefsteak tomatoes out there right now, ought to fry some of those big boys up. The wife prefers the zucchini grilled, so we have that grilled.

transfer those plants into the ground. They'll grow much better. And give them plenty of water and sun.

I'm just now getting flowers on my vines. My berry patch has gone crazy.

I wish my sister was still married to the guy. He made the most amazing tomato sauce. If you can imagine something half way between tomato sauce and chutney, that is it.

I wish I lived in Tobra's climate.