How to Make Amazing Tomato Sauce with Fresh Tomatoes

Hey everyone, welcome back to my kitchen. I'm Bethany and today's recipe, I'm gonna show you how to make an amazing tomato sauce using your fresh garden tomatoes. This is such an easy recipe and sauce is just so much better made from scratch. So let's get right into it. All right, so the first thing that we wanna go over is the type of tomatoes that we're gonna use when making a sauce from scratch. So you really can use a variety of different tomatoes for sauce, but typically you would wanna use a plum tomato and the best variety would be a Roma tomato because they're richer and sweeter in taste and then they typically have a lower water content in them. So when you make the sauce with them, the concentration is just a lot richer. So those are ideal, but I kind of have a variety here because I'm using what we planted in our garden. So I typically plant cherry tomatoes and Roma tomatoes, that's really it. This year I mistakenly bought a different tomato than I thought was Roma tomatoes. So I'm having to use some of my mom's plum tomatoes because mine weren't Roma tomatoes. They're these vine ripened tomatoes, I think. I'm not sure the name of these, but they're just kind of these round tomatoes that I'm still gonna use for sauce because that's what I grew and it's kind of all about using what you have. However, the majority of the sauce is gonna be made up of these. I believe that they're Amish paste tomatoes. I think that's what they're called and they're a nice plum tomato. So we're gonna use these. I have about five pounds. That's what I'm gonna use for my sauce. And so now we're gonna blanch these so that we can get the skin removed. All right, so before I put these in boiling water, what I wanna do is just first prep the tomatoes. So you just wanna take a little paring knife and just X the bottom of them. That's gonna help the tomatoes peel a little bit faster in the water. So we're just gonna take them and X the bottom. And we're not taking the stems out just yet. I like to let them boil first and then afterward I'll take the stem out. But some people do that before boiling them or softening them, but I like to just wait until afterward. All right, so now that our water is boiling, we're about to put our tomatoes in. But first I have a bowl of ice water that's sitting off to the side that's ready once the tomatoes are done. And we're gonna kind of blanch the tomatoes once they're out of the boiling water. So I have kind of like a big slotted spoon just because we don't wanna burn ourselves with this. So I'm just gonna drop some of these tomatoes in. I'm gonna do this in batches just because I didn't do a big pot. And we're gonna put the tomatoes in for about 30 seconds to a minute. And that's just enough time for the skin to start to peel and kind of, whoa. So it's just enough time for the tomatoes to kind of peel and start coming off the tomato. Okay, so they've been in for about 30 seconds. And as you can see, this one's peeling. That's what we wanna see. We wanna see the skin just start to kind of pull away from the tomato. So I think the bigger ones are gonna take a little bit more time, but this smaller one looks like it's done. Yep, so that's what we wanna see. And now we're going to transfer this over to the ice water bath. And what this is gonna do is it's gonna stop the tomato from continuing to cook, but also cool it down really fast. And it's going to help us just be able to handle the tomatoes because they're pretty hot after boiling in this. And these look like they're ready to go. So we're gonna put these in too. So now that we're done with the tomatoes, now we can peel them and get them ready to cook. All right, so now we can peel these. So we're just gonna take a paring knife and just gonna kind of take the skin like that and peel it. And I'm just gonna kind of take the discard and put it in like a little bowl. And then after that, we're gonna take our knife and we're just going to carefully remove the stem. This is really hard and we don't want this in the sauce. So, and this is why it's helpful to have a paring knife for this part. So you're just gonna take that and remove that. And then we'll just take our peeled tomato and put it in another bowl. And then we'll repeat that with the other tomatoes. You can see how easily the skin just comes right off of the tomato. And that's why it's so important that you boil them like that because that really is the best way to get the skin off because you don't really want skin in a sauce. Unless I'm doing a cherry tomato sauce, I don't mind the skin in that because they're so small. But for this, we wanna do it the right way, which is no skin involved and we can easily remove it because if you don't boil them, it's gonna take forever to peel the skin off. Okay, so now that we're finished with peeling them, we're gonna just dice them to just prepare them for the sauce. So you could crush them with your hands, but I just like to dice them myself because I want it to be in smaller pieces so that the sauce can break down easier. So we're just gonna dice them. We're just gonna pick it up with all the juices and put it back into this bowl. All right, so now we're finished with that. Now we're gonna clean this up and get ready to cook the sauce. Okay, so we're gonna work on the base of the sauce. So I'm just chopping up a yellow onion. I had a really large yellow onion. It was a bit too big. So I'm just gonna use half of it. And yeah, you just want like a small yellow onion. And then I have five cloves of garlic that we're going to finely mince or chop. I'm surprised I am not crying from that yellow onion. Those are the ones that typically get me. But the red onion lately have been making me tear up quite a bit. All right, so we have a pan heating up over medium heat, medium to low heat. And then I'm gonna add three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Want a nice generous amount for a sauce. All right, so now we're going to add the onion. Now we're gonna stir this in here. And we wanna cook this for about five minutes on a lower heat just to really cook the onions. And I'm gonna add a pinch of salt. So we always wanna add salt to aromatics and especially our onion, it helps them sweat. And if you've made my San Marzano tomato sauce, you'll notice that there is no onion in that sauce. We just used garlic. And that's just the way that my mom taught me to make it growing up. But when I made this sauce recipe, I wanted an onion in it because it's nice when you're using fresh tomatoes because you wanna build flavor as much as possible. So I felt like the onion was the right addition. Plus we're using garlic always. Okay, so the onions have been cooking for about five minutes and they look perfectly cooked. We don't want them to have browned edges. We just want them to be gently cooked with the oil. Now we're gonna add the garlic and we're only going to allow the garlic to cook for just 30 to 60 seconds with the onion. Now we're gonna mix that in there. All right, so that should be enough time. Now we're gonna add our tomatoes. Just gonna carefully pour those in. Some of the onion got on there. Now we're just gonna stir all that together. This smells amazing. I'm very excited for this to be finished because I love fresh tomato sauce. I can just eat it by the spoon, that's how good it is. And before we let this cook, we're gonna season it generously with a healthy pinch of salt and then a nice generous amount of pepper. And if you would like a little bit of a kick of heat, you can add a pinch of red pepper flakes to this too. And we are going to add herbs, but I don't add them while it cooks. If you've watched my San Marzano tomato sauce video, you know that herbs should always go at the end when you're making sauce. And now we're gonna let the sauce simmer for about an hour and a half, maybe even two hours, if you feel like the sauce needs to cook a little bit longer because of the liquids inside. It just kind of varies a little bit just because using fresh tomatoes, they're all a little bit different. And so what we're gonna do is leave it uncovered and let it simmer gently, just on a low simmer. You'll wanna stir this every 15 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes, just about, just so that it's not burning on the bottom and it's evenly cooking throughout. So you won't need to cover it just because we kind of want those liquids to evaporate in the sauce. If you find that it's evaporating very quickly, you can cover it, but I like to leave it uncovered just because it kind of helps the sauce cook and reduce a little bit more. So yep, we'll cook it and then we'll add the herbs at the end. Okay, so the sauce is done. It's been simmering for about an hour and a half and that gave it the perfect amount of time to really richen up and the juices have really absorbed. So it looks perfect. And now we're going to add our herbs because we always wanna add those at the end for the best, fresh, bright flavor. So I'm doing about two generous tablespoons, but this looks more like three, but that's fine. There's never too much basil in a recipe, at least in my opinion. So we're gonna stir this in and it smells so good. Once you add that basil, it just comes together and smells like a true tomato sauce. And with the consistency of my sauce, it's a little bit chunkier and I don't mind that. You can use kind of like a potato masher to kind of help break the tomatoes down a little bit more. Or if you like a smoother consistency, you can use like a hand immersion blender to blend up and just kind of create a little bit more of a smooth consistency. But I like this, especially if it's served with pasta. I like that texture. So you can do whichever one fits your preference, but now we can taste it. Mm, it's delicious. It is so fresh in flavor. It's just totally different than a canned tomato sauce, which I love, but this just tastes so fresh. It's made from scratch, so what can be better? But you taste the beautiful tomatoes and they're rich. They have sweetness to them and they're not super acidic. And you have that beautiful fresh basil flavor and the garlic and onion. It's so good. I think really shines when served with pasta and some Parmigiano-Reggiano, of course. But just simply like that in a dish, I think this sauce is just perfect. But you can serve this with chicken Parmesan or eggplant Parmesan or in a lasagna if you would like. But I think that this sauce truly just is beautiful, just served with some pasta, some cheese. It's so, so good. And it's also a great gift too. I actually will make this every summer and I typically will give a jar to my parents or anyone. So it makes kind of a nice gift because it's a sauce made with a lot of love. It's from scratch and you can use your own tomatoes. We also have on the website cherry tomato sauce that you can do where we roast the cherry tomatoes. We also have a fresh tomato soup where I use garden tomatoes to do that with. So there's definitely a few other recipes on our site that you can use with fresh tomatoes. Also our cherry tomato pasta, can't forget about that. We did a video about that about a month ago and it's so good. That's just my favorite tomato recipe to do in the summertime. So we hope you enjoy this recipe and we'll catch you on the next one.