Tomato Base for Sauce
This year my fancy pressure cooker arrived just before the tomatoes. How happy am I?!?!
I decided to try a simpler sauce (i.e. shorter processing time). This one is tomato, onion and garlic, herbs and that’s it. Apparently onion and garlic don’t impact the processing time the same way peppers do! I separately roasted and froze chunks of red pepper to add when I open the jar to heat the sauce.
I got a bushel from Fortino’s ($15.99, up $1 from last year) because the half-bushels at the market were $12 each so it was more economical and they assured me these are Ontario grown. FYI 30 pounds = 13.6kg. 2kg is 15 roma tomatoes, so 30 lbs is 102 tomatoes (yes I counted, it’s a thing). The onions and garlic were $1 each. I am assuming the cost of the jars as capital, not an annual expense, and lids are $2.13 with tax at the grocery store. I yielded 19 jars from this recipe, which is two boxes (one silver and one gold). That means, my average cost per jar was $0.90. Classico is currently on sale for $2.99 each, heehee.
The first recipe I found for seasoned sauce called for 30lb of tomatoes to 1 cup onion and 4 cloves garlic plus herbs. This one required 25 minutes for quarts at 11 lb in the pressure canner.
The second recipe was very similar but started with only 10lb of tomatoes with 3 onions and 4 cloves garlic. This one claimed 15 minutes of processing for pints at 11 lb in the pressure canner, which is what the National Centre for Home Canning recommends for plain tomato sauce – I am going to go with 25 minutes for quarts all the same (just to be safe. Don’t want to waste all this effort).
I set out three separate pots – two on the stove plus a crockpot. The value of this was to let it cook down in a reduced amount of time. Two I seasoned equally and the other was plain tomatoes. I also cut down my time for prep about 2½ hours by pureeing the tomatoes (seeds and skins included). I still quartered them for easy removal of the core, then cubed them and tossed them in my sister’s giant processor and spun down each batch, then tossed it in one of the pots.
Once the crock pot was 2/3 full, I set it to high to cook down with the lid ajar, then I sauted onion and garlic and divided them into the stove top pots, along with bay leaves and pepper corns. Then into each pot I added 2 tsp each: basil and oregano, 1 tsp white pepper and into one 1 Tb rosemary.
While the stove top pots were simmering on low, I continued preparing the tomato puree and adding it equally to each. I stirred all three pots occasionally to prevent burning and let them cook down to thicken.
In the end I canned 6 “almost quart” jars (700mL using the ATLAS imitation by PC and Classico) of the rosemary sauce using gold lids, 4 of the other herb sauce using silver lids, and 7 pints of plain tomato sauce also using gold lids. The latter I processed for 20 minutes at 6 lbs of pressure. this was considerable harder to maintain because it cooks at very low temperatures. Interesting.
The pressure canner is interesting – it only takes 3 quarts of water (plus 2 Tbs vinegar to prevent hard water stains on the jars), you bring the heat up high until it starts to vent and then turn it to med-low for 10 minutes. Once the pressure cap went on, I raised the heat back to high for about 5 minutesto bring it up to 11 lbs. Every 5 minutes I checked on the guage and lowered it slightly until the last 5 minutes were just at a simmer! It also takes close to half an hour of cooling for the pressure vent to release.
This method seems to use considerable less stove-top energy and less processing time once up to pressure, but the venting prep and cool down after seem to make this versatile but not a time saver over all. It also amazed me that with all that loss of steam, the water level was still okay! I added ¼ cup all the same, just incase!
