For the Love of Tomatoes

I love a ripe tomato off the vine from the greenhouse. I've made tomato sauce before by boiling down tomatoes with a few other ingredients but the result has never yielded that satisfying tangy, sweet and thirst quenching fresh tomato taste.

Flipping through my favourite cook book: Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli, I found a recipe for tomato sauce that does not differ much from my own except for a very important ingredient, and simple concept: Tomato Conserva.

Tomato Conserva is essentially nice ripe tomatoes, boiled until soft, and dried out in the oven for hours to yield a super concentrated sweet, tangy paste that is almost caramel like in consistency and colour. Well, sort of anyway. According to Cooking by Hands, in Italy, instead of using the oven, you would instead leave it in the hot Mediterranean sun all day and again the next. Italians are so romantic when it comes to cooking.

I followed the recipe from Cooking by Hand with a few small adaptations due to lack of equipment.

Tomato Conserva

Ingredients:

Before

- Tomatoes (I used Roma's) x lots. Final weight will be ~1/10th of what you started with. Thankfully you only need a heaping tablespoon or two per sauce.
- Olive Oil
- Salt
- Food mill (I don't have one so I improvised using a blender)
- 4-6 hours and a bottle of wine or two to pass the time.

Directions:

1. Wash, core and dice tomatos.
2. Warm up some olive oil in a pan.
3. Add tomatoes and turn up the heat to near max.

After (in the oven for 5 hours)

4. Once the tomatoes beging to boil (not necessary to add liquid, enough will be released from the tomatoes), allow them to cook and soften for a few minutes.
5. Pass through a food mill (or just remove as many seeds prior to cooking as possible and pulse in a food processor like I did) until smooth.
6. Spread out on a baking tray (the more surface area exposed to the heat, the better) and allow the tomatoes to dry out in the oven for 3-4 hours at 350 F.

7. Turn the mixture over with a spatula and spread it out again. Almost like icing a cake. Then turn the oven down to 200 F and allow it to dry for another 1-2 hours. The result will be a reddish/brown colour.
8. At this point it is done. Add as much to your sauce as you like
(I added two heaping tablespoons). the rest can be stored in a jar with a layer of olive oil poured over top to keep bacteria out. Store in fridge.

Yes, use that much olive oil on the top
to keep bacteria out.

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

- Large Italian Sausage x 1 from Off the Hook Meat works in Whitehorse, Yukon.
- Tomatos x 5 or 6. Any type you like. I used Roma's as they were the ripest tomatos I could find.
- Garlic x half a bulb
- Rosemary x 1 sprig (use whatever herb you like. I used rosemary because it goes well with sausage and Whitehorse was dry of basil. If this was just tomato sauce without the sausage, I would have just left it out all together).
- Onion x 1/2 (use a full if using a small onion).
- Dry White wine. Don't use cooking wine. Never use wine you wouldn't also drink.
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Heaping Spoon of Tomato Conserva x 2



Directions:

1. Wash and core tomatoes. Dice tomatoes, onion and mince the garlic. Cut sausage into slices.
2. Heat up some olive oil in a pot.
3. Add sausage and cook until brown on all sides. Remove sausage and set aside for now.
4. Add a good glug of wine to deglaze the brown bits off the bottom of the pot
5. Add the onion and allow to cook until it becomes transparent but not brown.
6. Add garlic and cook until the scent of cooked garlic hits your nose.
7. Add tomatoes, turn heat to near max and allow to boil for 2-4 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and allow to cool a little, then transfer to a food processor and blend until smooth (or pass through a food mill if you have one).
9. Return to the pot, add sausage, rosemary, another good glug of wine and some tomato conserva (see above). I used 2 heaping tablespoons of conserva.
10. Allow the sauce to boil and reduce in liquid until it reaches your desired consistency. The same volume it was before adding the wine would be a safe bet.



At this point it is ready to serve with pasta or gnocchi with a generous amount of parmesan and some cracked black pepper.

We had it with some fresh pasta that came out rather thick this time around (I really need to find a way to roll out gluten free pasta dough without breaking it).


Cheers!

Yep, I write these while drinking and in my pj's sometimes.