Homemade Tomato Sauce

This is the third year that I have been making my own homemade tomato sauce and I can honestly say that every year is a learning experience.  The first time I attempted to can tomato sauce it turned out more like tomato juice than sauce.  I have since learned that cooking time is everything.  Making tomato sauce takes a little preparation, but nothing really difficult.  The first thing I do is wash all of my tomatoes very well.  This year I am using my heirloom brandywine and moskvich tomatoes since they are both pretty meaty as far as tomatoes go.  In the past I have used cherry tomatoes and roma tomatoes, but I find that the larger beefsteak varieties produce more sauce pound for pound than the smaller cherry and romas.

This is the first big crop of tomatoes from our garden.  They were cored and the bad parts were cut out and into the saucepan they went.

 

 

I cook them on low heat until they are pretty mushy and there is plenty of liquid in the pan.  The next step involves smashing them in a strainer to remove the skins and seeds from the sauce.

 

 

The leftover liquid goes back into the sauce pan where I simmer it until the sauce is as thick as I want it.  The skins and seeds become chicken candy (They go bananas over anything tomato).

 

This is the sauce just before I canned it.

At this stage it was fairly thick and had cooked down more than I had expected.  It didn't even fully fill a pint jar.

 

I decided to process the single jar anyways.  I plan on using it fairly soon since it didn't use the full space of the jar it was supposed to. 

 

Today's take home lesson is that it takes a heck of alot of tomatoes to make a decent amount of sauce.  Next time I hope to have alot more tomatoes to round out my stores.