Food Day Friday: tomato sauce from the garden

This is the third batch of sauce I've made from the garden (I actually did it July 13, it just took this long for it to come up in Food Day Friday)

The first two batches only had tomatoes from our garden in it.

This batch includes our Juliets and Stupices AND 15 Adkinsons from my parent's garden. The Adkinson is a variety introduced by Auburn University in 1966. I think that's kind of cool.

what I used: 15 Adkinsons, 3 Stupices and 23 Juliets

I put them in boiling water for about a minute. This makes peeling the skins off EASY PEASEY.

Cool them off in ice water and peel.

This is all the tomatoes, peeled. I put them in whole and let the cooking process break them down. My mother used to dice hers. I think that's a waste of time. Cooking and a little mashing with a potato masher at about hour 2 makes dicing an unnecessary step.

NOTE: I don't have to do this with the Stupices or Juliets. But I decided to core the Adkinsons just because the core was more substantial and "woody"

This is after about 3 hours of cooking on medium heat. You can really cook it as much or as little as you'd like. I like my sauce thick. So there you go You can see from the residue how much water cooked out. I love that rich dark color.

This is how I store my sauce (for now) if I had more, I'd can it. But the only size jars I have are quart and with what I have, that's too much jar and not enough sauce. It's labeled "w/ Adkinson no salt" because the one under it (the 2nd batch) says "J&S w/salt"
Once I have bigger batches of tomatoes, I'll start canning.

Also, the only reason I don't add anything but maybe salt to my sauce is because I don't know what I'm going to use it for. It could be spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, eggplant parmesan sauce, sausage and peppers rustica sauce, heck in a couple of months, I could use it in chili and other soups. Not adding anything keeps the sauce much more versatile for later use.

I guess since my "sauce" is only tomatoes (and sometimes salt) I'm actually making what my mother would all "stewed tomatoes." eh, I'm calling it sauce. It makes me feel more accomplished. ;-)

EDIT: This post was written about a month before it actually posted. I've canned 3.5 quarts of sauce since I wrote this. SCORE.