This may very well be my favorite time and day of the season! We’re processing our remaining tomatoes and pasta sauce is one the menu!
Seriously, the entire house smells so good. Garlic, onions, tomatoes and herbs densely permeate the air, it’s practically an intoxicating smell! Were you to descend on our kitchen right now, you’d swear some old Italian lady lives here! Some years, we really go “all out” on our sauces and this year happens to be one of them!
For our cherry tomato harvest, we crafted up a chunky tomato and garlic forward sauce. Our cherry tomatoes were slowly cooked down over an hour, until they just barely burst. From here, we mashed the tomatoes so we’d get a decently tomato-ey sauce. I spent some time balancing the sauce, since cherry tomatoes can be quite acidic, and absolutely nailed it.
With the remainder of our full size ripe tomatoes, we went for a proper roasted tomato sauce. We brought in all the fixings here! We roasted up onions, tomatoes, garlic, herbs, salt, three different freshly ground peppers, all drizzled in the finest imported Italian olive oil we can buy. Once roasted and just very lightly charred, the sauce is fully blended, balanced and given our classic “je ne sais quoi” that makes a pasta sauce really sing.
We love sending our tomato crop out in style. Crafting fine home grown pasta sauces is one of the best ways we know how to do that. We get to blend some of the freshest ingredients possible into something that we get to enjoy for months to come! Plus, we love riffing on pasta sauce recipes, hardly ever making the same exact one twice.
As you’ve seen us do several times now, we’re pursuing frozen pasta sauces over canning them. This gives us a ton of flexibility in recipe crafting, we simply don’t have to follow “boring and just OK” canning recipes. We can pretty much do what we want. With frozen sauces, you’re not trying to hit a particular pH and you can exercise all of your awesome knowledge when it comes to cooking and crafting recipes. If you didn’t know, pasta sauces can usually be frozen and it really doesn’t affect texture, since the sauce is often obliterated anyway.
You might observe that we’re not adding protein to our sauces. Though you can do this and still can freeze the sauces, we like a bit of flexibility. It’s quite easy to simply brown ground meat and add in the sauce later, when you go to make your actual pasta. Going “meatless” in your preservation simply offers you more flexibility later, making the choice of vegetarian or omnivore later.
We also decided to demonstrate a different freezer storage technique for you all. When it comes to sauces, you can store them in freezer grade ziplock bags. This allows you to “flat pack” them into the freezer, which takes up a ton less space. Simply bleed out all the air and freeze flat. Pro tip? This also works for soups, stews and other things you might want to freeze as well. Though we generally prefer to freeze in jars, since it’s less messy, we figured you all might appreciate seeing this alternate freezing technique.
We’re going to have some decadent pastas in coming months! Kind of kicking myself for not saving any for tonight’s dinner, but we opted to maximize the amount that went into preservation. But, we’ll get to enjoy these soon enough and boy are we looking forward to it!
