Don’t forget the sauce! Let’s demonstrate another preservation method we use, primarily for soups or sauce we might create from our produce!
When it comes to preserving cherry tomatoes, the options for preservation tend to be a bit more limited than what you see with regular tomatoes. We’ve generally gravitated towards sauce making, as it’s a product we can easily freeze for long term storage.
At a certain point in the season, we’re just inundated with our Sakura cherry tomatoes. It’s a good problem to have as it means we can make up a whole lot of pasta sauce using a lot of ingredients from the garden. Pasta sauce is a great way to make a lot of tomatoes and other things disappear.
There’s few absolute rules when it comes to pasta sauces, at least if you’re not a bonafide Italian. We usually start with some sort of known recipe, but heavily riff on them each season based on what we’re itching to use up or what we might think will go well.
We generally prefer oven roasted sauces, as it gives a bunch of umami flavors to the sauce. This just means we put the raw ingredients in the oven for 35-45 minutes, prior to saucing. But, fair game for additions to the pasta sauce are scallions, onions, peppers (hot and/or sweet), garlic, basil and of course your other herbs and spices. Ratios “sort of matter,” but the dominant veggie should be those tomatoes!
Our packaging method here uses straight freezer bags, portioned out to single meal servings. This was a trick we learned from freezer cooking, allowing you to flat pack those sauces into the freezer to save space. When you’re ready to use them, just remove it from the bag and reheat in a sauce pan.
Once frozen, these sauces are good for at least a year and likely much longer. We rarely have the need for such long preservations when it comes to our gourmet sauces, but it’s nice to have flexibility.
You can also use very similar methods with preserving large batches of soups, stews or other sauces. This is why we dig freezing as there’s a whole lot less “food safety” stuff we have to pay attention to. Things like the acidity or basicity of a sauce simply matter less when the food is stored in an environment that doesn’t promote bad stuff!
This sauce turned out super tasty and we are looking forward to using it! Those Sakura’s do not disappoint for flavor and our other additions made for a solid sauce!
