My First Sauce Taste Test

[Kikaida]

Gotta say I'm a little disappointed. The sauce was good, don't get me wrong, real good. The thing is, we have an international market close by that sells canned sauce from Italy for cheap and to be honest, they tasted the same. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or is sauce just sauce?

Fresh homegrown tomatoes are way different than the market variety and much tastier...but the sauce? Not as much wow factor versus effort. For me at least.
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Any advice?

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Kikaida

Gotta say I'm a little disappointed. The sauce was good, don't get me wrong, real good. The thing is, we have an international market close by that sells canned sauce from Italy for cheap and to be honest, they tasted the same. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or is sauce just sauce?

Fresh homegrown tomatoes are way different than the market variety and much tastier...but the sauce? Not as much wow factor versus effort. For me at least.
-
Any advice?

No advice until you share with us which fruits from which specific tomato varieties you used for your sauce.

Several decades ago most of my tomato friends switched from using paste varieties to using the BEST tasting fruits they had at the time, regardless of color and size, to make sauce from.

Just cook it down a bit more than making sauce with mainly paste varieties and you've got some great tasting sauce.

There were some who would make green or orange sauce or whatever, just for the novelty of it, and of course a few who made white sauce to use on white pasta, just b'c they wanted to.

Carolyn

[Worth1]

To me sauce is just sauce, I dont even like it that much.

I would rather start from tomato paste for cooking.

Worth

[ginger2778]

It would be helpful to know what you put in. What was your recipe. My sauces always end up more tasty than anything I could buy. That's what your result should be, probably will be with a bit of tweaking.

[efisakov]

I start my sauce with cubed onion, sweet pepper and than add tomatoes. I only cook it for 40 minutes. Salt to taste. It will be too much juice in it still. I do not care because I would cook my pasta al dente and finish cooking it in the sauce. That turn it off and walk away for few minutes. All the juices will be absorbed and pasta with sauce is ready. I like chunks of tomatoes in my sauce. You will not get that from the can. My son refuses to eat any other. Sauce tastes like it was just made fresh.
I use the best tasting tomatoes of different colors, like Carolyn mentioned above.
BTW the best ever for me was sauce made with Black Pineapple/Ananas Noire (4-colors, RL) tomato.

[Gardeneer]

Plain sauce , is one thing and flavored one is another.
You can make a best tasting sauce from any tomatoes, by adding, herbs, spices.
I prefer making plain, plain sauce and add all the herbs spices FRESH when I open the jar and use it. Sauce is a food with many ingredients beside the tomato.

Gardeneer

[ChristinaJo]

Well, if the canned sauce is really good, and yours tasted the same,than I'd count that as a success!
If not, back to the drawing board and explore other varieties to grow.

[ChristinaJo]

I made tomato soup tonight with a mix up mash up of tomatoes from my garden.

Tomatoes: peeled
Bloody Butcher
Eva purple ball
Earls Faux
Consulto Genevese (BB) strain

Sautéed in evoo,with garlic(I grew)
A touch of butter( trying real hard to be good)
Salt pepper
Chopped shredded carrot
Chopped celery
Onion
Chicken broth
Oregano,lemon thyme, and sweet basil from the garden. Whirred with the stick blender and slow cooked it on low for about 15 to 30 minutes. I'm letting it sit in the fridge overnight to "blend and marry".
I figure sauce the same way, just cook down more to concentrate the flavors?

[Anthony_Toronto]

Originally Posted by Gardeneer

Plain sauce , is one thing and flavored one is another.
You can make a best tasting sauce from any tomatoes, by adding, herbs, spices.
I prefer making plain, plain sauce and add all the herbs spices FRESH when I open the jar and use it. Sauce is a food with many ingredients beside the tomato.

Gardeneer

Agreed. The best sauce for me tastes like fresh perfect san marzano/similar tomatoes. The sauce that I make from the bushels and bushels of these things that I buy, wash, cut, heat, mill, and can/jar with a sprig of basil is always great, but it is pretty basic.

Heat olive oil to medium, put in 1/2 white onion (just sliced in half, not chopped), or maybe both halves, 1/2 of a green pepper, and saute/sweat/soften for a bit until they just start to brown, then add some chopped garlic and stir for maybe 30 seconds, and then pour in home-jarred pureed tomatoes, including basil, and add 1/2 jar of water for every jar of tomatoes. Throw in a handful of small carrots (whole bagged baby carrots work fine). Add some black pepper and salt (sparingly on the salt, as the sauce will be reduced...but some at this stage is important). Put lid on until it comes to a simmer, then lid off or askew to slowly simmer until reduced by about a third, at which point you can salt to taste. But if you really want it to taste good, once it starts simmering add some fresh (i.e. non-baked or fried) meatballs, or nice sausages, or nice pork ribs, and let them cook in and add flavour to the sauce. and then at the end I pluck out the 1/2 pepper, the onion, and the carrots, which again were all left in big pieces and are easy to remove (and if you miss some no big deal).

Adding peppers to sauce is a huge mistake in my opinion, really messes with the flavour, aside from the 1/2 green pepper in this one (or maybe a few jalapenos, to give a background hint of green). Covering up the taste of the tomatoes (rather then just enhancing them) with lots of herbs and spices and other vegetables seems to kind of defeat the purpose. Might as well by a jar of prego thick and chunky if you are going to do that! I prefer a recipe that allows the great flavour of fresh ripe tomato to shine through. That's the difference between tomato sauce and just pasta sauce.

[Dewayne mater]

Marsha - would you mind sharing your sauce recipe? I've still got a ton of san marzanos and they continue to produce when everything else has nearly stopped. I've tried a couple of sauces with them and haven't been too impressed with either.

Dewayne Mater

[Worth1]

Originally Posted by Dewayne mater

Marsha - would you mind sharing your sauce recipe? I've still got a ton of san marzanos and they continue to produce when everything else has nearly stopped. I've tried a couple of sauces with them and haven't been too impressed with either.

Dewayne Mater

Dewayne Mater I dont know if you will take anything from me or not but I have learned to add a little blue cheese to my sauce while cooking it for pasta.
NOT during the canning process but when it is about to be eaten.'

My wife taught me this along with putting a dash of A1 and Worcestershire sauce in it.
Along with garlic onions sweet peppers paprika and such.
It is the bomb.

Worth

[ginger2778]

Originally Posted by Dewayne mater

Marsha - would you mind sharing your sauce recipe? I've still got a ton of san marzanos and they continue to produce when everything else has nearly stopped. I've tried a couple of sauces with them and haven't been too impressed with either.

Dewayne Mater

Here you go.


I made and canned a bunch more sauce, and I wrote down what I put in. You can of course vary this, more hot pepper flakes, vinegar instead of lemon juice, sugar instead of honey, even agave syrup or maple syrup, it all works, but here's the basics.
6 qt tomatoes, any color or type, peeled. I use boiling water for 3 minutes per tomato and the skin slips right off.
3 medium yellow onions small chopped
6large garlic cloves, minced
4Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1&1/2 dried Ancho chilies, I get them at WalMart foods
2&1/2 Tbsp kosher salt
2Tbsp dried italian herb mix
1/2 - 1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 170g can(small can) tomato paste
1/2 cup honey
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lemon

peel and coarse chop all tomatoes

heat oil over med high heat, then saute onions until just slightly starting to brown, then add garlic and saute for about 45 seconds
add all the tomatoes and stir well, bring to boil, then turn fire to low and cook stirring occasionally for 20 minutes.
add the chopped chilies,salt,herbs,red pepper flakes, simmer stirring occasionally for 30 minutes more
take a potato masher and mash dopwn the sauce to make the bits finer, but still chunky, if you like a smooth sauce just process in blender or immersion blender.
add tomato paste, honey, and lemon zest and juice, and taste to adjust seasoning.
Now it's ready to can.

[Kikaida]

Thanks for the kind replies, I'm using Martino's Roma for the tomatoes. My procedure was quite simple. Toss them whole in simmering water until they split and became soft, ran them through a strainer removing the seeds and skin, heated a pan with a little olive oil (not the character) and browned some garlic...Tossed in the sauce with some salt and a pinch of fresh basil and reduced. I really wanted a basic sauce to see what base-line would be like. And I guess that's exactly what I got.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Kikaida

Thanks for the kind replies, I'm using Martino's Roma for the tomatoes. My procedure was quite simple. Toss them whole in simmering water until they split and became soft, ran them through a strainer removing the seeds and skin, heated a pan with a little olive oil (not the character) and browned some garlic...Tossed in the sauce with some salt and a pinch of fresh basil and reduced. I really wanted a basic sauce to see what base-line would be like. And I guess that's exactly what I got.

Martino's Roma is one of thebetter paste varities and in the following link you'll see I know it well since I got seeds for it from Maureen who first SSE listed it in an SSE yearbook from the early 90's. And I sent seeds for trial to several seed vendors who I knew well, as I always have and still do.

http://t.tatianastomatobase.com/wiki...b=General_Info

You can see how popular it is by looking at seed availability in the above link. Tania has not been able to update for 2015 but I'm pretty sure many of the places offering it in 2014 still have it. I just checked my 2015 SSE Yearbook, and yes, still beihng listed and what surprised me is that Maureen was again offering it herself with all the background info and more.

Sheesh, it has to be several decades since I got it from Maureen so she must be almost as old as I am.

BUT, as others have said good sauce is made with several ingredients and very few would use just ONE paste variety as you've already seed above.

So IMO the problem is NOT that of using Martino's Roma at all, rather what other ingredients you use in making your sauce and seeing how many don't even use paste varieties to make super tasting sauce.

I hope that helps,

Carolyn

[Worth1]

Martino's Roma is the problem for sure.
This is about the same tasteless tomato they use to make commercial sauce.
You wont get anything like that as far as taste is concerned from the more flavorful tomatoes.
Worth