You know you're in trouble when the recipe calls for ingredients in bushels. But, when you have several bushels of tomatoes, that's the sort of recipe you reach for. We'd already made a few weeks' worth of salsa (which is saying something for us), and several months' worth of pizza sauce; why not take another crack at that spaghetti sauce that gave us so much trouble last year?
Wash, rinse, and photograph tomatoes. (Sorry, I dig the reflections here...)
Batch two of six. (The cherry tomatoes were for snacking; they didn't go into the sauce.)
Chop and add other ingredients. Never, ever, did I imagine that I would look at this pot and think it was too small...
Cook it all down for 2½ hours...
Take turns running it through the food mill, and blending the bits that won't go through the grate...
Cook it again... (Note how much less the volume is here. We poured off a lot of liquid to make a thicker sauce.)
Rack 'em...
Boil 'em to disinfect and seal the jars...
...and you're done!
Costs: 6-7 hours of time, one dead blender (RIP, Oster; you had a long and interesting life), and marginal increases in the gas and electric bills.
Yields: Seven quart jars of spaghetti sauce.
Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out if it was worth all the trouble, too!
2 comments:
We do about sixty quarts of spaghetti sauce a year. We're always motivated to do it because we remember the year in Michigan when we ran out early. We tried to find decent spaghetti sauce at the store... ugh. None of us wants to go through that again.
It helps that we have a squeezo. Said device is also very helpful for making applesauce, another thing you don't want to buy at the store.
Also, instead of pouring off juice to get a thicker sauce, my mom adds tomato paste, at the last minute when it's pretty much done cooking down (because it tends to stick after).
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