Skip to main content

Update: Tomato Sauce

Good tomato sauce requires a balance. On the one hand, it needs to be thick, which means removing water. On the other hand, it needs to taste fresh. Cooking the sauce for a long time increases its acidity and makes it taste less fresh. I stumbled upon an interesting technique to reduce the water content of the sauce without cooking---I froze the tomatoes.

I bought a case of roma tomatoes for canning. Thanks to a clogged kitchen sink, I couldn't make and can the sauce when I planned. Desperate, I put the tomatoes in the chest freezer for a few days---I put them on trays lined with parchment.

When I got back to the tomatoes, they were frozen solid and quite pretty, particularly after a little frost accumulated on them from the open air. I filled my pan with tomatoes and started to heat them. The liquid that came out was perfectly clear. As I drained off several batches of liquid, I started to get a little particulate matter, but the liquid was still mostly clear. Heating non-frozen tomatoes, in contrast, gives you liquid that is fairly clear but contains more tomato bits.

After draining out the liquid, that pan full of tomatoes was reduced to this small but rich batch. I cooked down all the tomatoes in the same way, then cooked them for a few minutes before canning. The result was the best batch of sauce I've made in several years.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asheville NC: Luella's BBQ

Luella's is a nouvelle BBQ outfit on the north side of Asheville. It is nestled among the trees in a lovely neighborhood. The restaurant has lots of windows for inside seating and plenty of outside seating. Service was courteous and amazingly fast. This is a combination plate with pork and brisket. Both were very moist and tender. For the pork, I tried both the mild and hot vinegar sauces. To my surprise, I preferred the milder one because it didn't assert itself too much. I enjoyed the spicy tomato sauce for my brisket. The hushpuppies were very good. The fried okra was fresh out of the fryer and excellent. The slaw was of the vinegary variety, which I usually enjoy, but this version is heavy on the white stuff and didn't have quite enough variety in tastes for me.
Post a Comment
Read more

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...
2 comments
Read more

Everybody's Pizza

Everybody's Pizza is across the street from Emory University.  It was founded in 1971 and has a seventies college feel.  But it isn't musty or dated---you don't feel like you are eating in a museum.  It's just pleasantly funky.  They played a Big Bird song while I was there.  What's no to like? The pizza is college-style as well, as contrasted to the Italian neighborhood style that is (or should be) the goal of a New York style pizzeria.  I think that the cheese is the ingredient that most leads me to this feeling.  In a New York pizza, the cheese would be central (even if it came from a low-grade Mob supplier), while in more suburban pizzas, the cheese is seen as one in a medley of ingredients that form the topping.  (I think that cheese-centrism should be the essence of pizza.  Remember that the modern pizza was created by adding cheese to traditional tomato sauce-covered bread.)  I think the biggest fault of this pizza is the crust, which I found to be just a lit...
Post a Comment
Read more