making and canning a rustic tomato sauce

Earlier in the week Erica from Northwest Edible Life wrote a blog post about making a thick tomato sauce. After reading her post I knew I had to give it a whirl.

One of the reasons I had been dehydrating the tomatoes this year instead of canning them was all of the work involved in making tomato sauce. The way I used to do it involved first crushing the tomatoes in the Saucemaster which separated out the seeds, cores, and skins and left just a smooth tomato puree. Then I had to cook the sauce down to the desired thickness on the stovetop. That method was pretty much a full day affair and lots of mess to clean up.

The new method has me chopping the tomatoes and placing them in a large stockpot. I turned the heat to medium and let them simmer for about 2 hours. I used my immersion blender to puree down some of the skins and larger chunks that hadn't fully fallen apart while simmering.




I was left with a rustic tomato sauce that was nicely thickened in just a fraction of the time it used to take me to make tomato sauce. From the time I added the chopped tomatoes to the stockpot until the time I removed the jars from the pressure canner was just 3 hours. If you add in the chopping time I'd estimate that this job took about 3 1/2 hours from start to finish. Contrast that with my old method that easily took 10 hours from start to finish. I won't say I'll never make a pureed and strained version of tomato sauce again, but it will be much rarer in our house.



For the actual pressure canning instructions, follow my old tutorial from the point where the tomato sauce has cooked down.

Here you see the final result - 6 quarts and one pint of rustic tomato sauce.