A friend of ours gave us several pounds...maybe 1/2 bushel or so.. of fresh tomatoes from her garden yesterday and I want to be sure to use them and not let them spoil. I was thinking of making homemade tomato sauce, but wasn't sure how. Can I just wash, cut into chunks, cook in the crock and then mash through a sieve to remove skins? Once I have the sauce, adding herbs and using it is no problem! I don't have a food mill.

Barb

I've made spaghetti sauce with whole tomatoes just by cooking them on the stove. They cook down and give off quite a bit of liquid. There's no need to remove the skin. Making spaghetti sauce I add garlic, onion and oregano to taste.

I cut small crosses in the bottoms of fresh tomatoes, and then chuck them in a pan of boiling water for a minute or two, until the skins split, then drain and rinse them in cold water. The skins slip right off. I am pretty finicky about skins and seeds being in my tomato sauce, though, so I take the time to get rid of them before cooking.

I quarter the tomatoes, take the stem out and toss into blender. Pour it all into a pan and cook and cook and cook. We like our sauce thick so I never peel or seed first.

Barb-I made a batch last summer (this summer was awful for tomatoes around here) and I used the blanch and peel then de-seed method. I'm not big on peels and seeds in sauce.

I imagine if you put the sauce through a food processor it might get it smoothed down some and still have the fiber from the skins.

This is how I do it as well. I am not a big fan of skin in my sauce!

I don't ever put it in a food processor. Instead I let it cook down for a hour or two. It usually melts down to mush on it's own this way!

I ended up just cutting up the tomatoes, simmering for a few hours, pressing through a strainer then cooking the result to reduce. It turned out perfect. We ate it in spaghetti sauce that day, then made some marinara for the freezer and also have a bit of just the tomato puree left over, so I'll pop it out of hte freezer today to make chicken breast in cocoa tomato sauce and serve over spaghetti squash. YUM!

That's my style - I don't bother peeling or de-seeding, too much fuss. A whir in the blender's not a bad idea, though, for those who dislike skin or seeds.

Cocoa tomato sauce??? That sounds delicious! Do you have a recipe to share?

A little after the fact, but I can go through scads of tomatoes by just making a pico de gallo to put on top of everything: tomato, onion, jalapeno, cilantro, lemon, garlic, red bell peppers, or whatever salsa-y thing I have in the kitchen.

I remove the skins with the blanching method because sometimes they can make the sauce bitter. I quartered the blanched tomatoes, dumped them in the crock pot along with chopped garlic, onions, parsley, Italian seasonings and let the thing cook away for 14 hours (put it in early in the morning before I left for work and it was ready when I got home that night). By letting it cook that long it actually broke down the seeds and made the sauce thicker. Couldn't have been easier to make and was delicious with the taste of fresh tomatoes. As others have said, there's enough water in the tomatoes themselves that you don't need to add any additional. Enjoy!

Here's the link for the cocoa/tomato/chicken stuff. I only used 1 tbsp of oil insted of 3, and I put about 1/4 tsp of red pepper flakes in.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/p...ipe/index.html

It was pretty good, and I will make it again.

Barb

The way we do it, we boil the tomatos, then take the skins off, then put them in this really old-timey machine my grandma used and turn the handle and it squishes them. You do that over a pan and viola!

Not sure if that helps at all lol.

Thank you for asking this. These explanations have helped me.

I was commenting on my Facebook about salsa and how I was using canned to make it because I don't really know how to work with it from fresh tomatoes. Someone mentioned salt rubs then pealing so they aren't turned to mush but can be diced.

Me I don't care about seeds being in it as I figure they aren't going to hurt me, like say an apple seed could. Right now I use Ragu and a can of tomatoes(like it a little chunky) and add additional Italian spices to the cooking for more flavor. This is one of my "processed/packaged" foods I'd like to cut out for more whole foods.

Interesting to learn how easy this is... I was just observing recently how much sweetner is added to tomato paste in the stores. It's inexpensive but not as natural as one might think.

My husband does the same thing.
He sautes onion and garlic first a bit, then adds chopped bell peppers, spices, including red pepper, sautes a bit more and finally adds the tomatoes. -- We eat the sauce after 20 -30 min of cooking and it is yummy.

I just cut into quarters & saute them with a little olive oil, salt & pepper. Cooking them like this first concentrates the flavors. They finish breaking down when I simmer the sauce for an hour in a pot.