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Cooking with the Market - Easy Freezer Marinara Sauce

I grew up in a canning family with a mother who canned through her 80s because she took great joy from the process of putting up food for the winter. Her habits of thrift also played a not insignificant role. Late each summer, she would gather her seemingly ancient canning tools, buy her lids, bring in the boxes of glass jars stored in the garage from last year's canned goods, and begin work.

The results crammed our pantry shelves with colorful jars of peaches, pears, cherries, tomatoes, beets, jams, jellies and syrups. Her favorites though were pickles - refrigerator pickles, watermelon pickles, sweet pickles and quarts of dill pickles made with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, along with cucumbers and dill from her garden. There were no recipes.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn the art from Mother, and I sorely miss her pickles. Instead I freeze produce. Now that's pretty insignificant next to canning, but it's what I can manage. I never manage to freeze enough, though, as I find each winter when by February, my frozen stash has dwindled, I yearn for the taste of summer, and I find myself asking yet once more, "Now why didn't I freeze more apples, peaches, and berries?"

Easy freezer Marinara tomato sauce
This year, my freezing project has been Marinara tomato sauce. Inevitably, the big question from the beginning was, "Now just what tomatoes should I use?"

Which tomatoes make the best sauce?
Most tomato sauce recipes call for plum tomatoes because they have less juice and fewer seeds so they cook down into a thicker sauce with concentrated flavor. Fair enough, but I prefer the flavor of beefsteak tomatoes. I went to an authority, a friend of Italian descent who cooks up giant vats of tomato sauce each year from the bushels of tomatoes in her garden. She's not particular. She sensibly uses whatever tomatoes are vine-ripe at the moment of sauce-making. That approach is good enough for me.

I gathered ripe plum tomatoes, Goliath beefsteak tomatoes and Clarance cluster tomatoes, all from Kittitas Valley Greenhouse at the Market. When I explained my sauce-making plans to Rich, his eyes lit up and he immediately suggested the Clarance variety, "Clarance is a good sauce tomato." Here's what one case of tomatoes looks like - the tomatoes sort of spill out all over the kitchen.

20lb. tomatoes

I commenced work. I made one batch of sauce only with plum tomatoes, another with just Goliath, one with only Clarance, and then a hybrid of Clarance and plum tomatoes. Twenty pounds of tomatoes does go a long way.

Just as the recipes state, the plum tomatoes quickly make a thicker sauce. But as I lined up all my results on the kitchen counter and did taste test after taste test, the winner for my taste buds was pretty clear, the sauce made only from Clarance tomatoes.

I also experimented with vegetables such as carrots, celery or onions, additions many recipes call for. What we ended up liking the best was also the simplest. No adds. Here's our favorite:

4 to 4 ½ lbs. Clarance tomatoes from the Market, peeled and chopped
To peel the tomatoes, immerse them in boiling water for 30 seconds or so, plunge them immediately into ice water, then remove the core (a grapefruit spoon works well). You should be able to peel the skin quickly with your fingertips.
3 cloves garlic from the Market, minced
2 tbsp. olive oil
¾ tsp. salt
Pepper

Heat olive oil in large stock pot, add garlic and heat for a minute or two. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper. Cook over low to medium heat for about an hour.

Remove from heat and run the sauce through a food mill in small batches to remove the seeds. Be sure to scrape off the pulp on the bottom of the mill and add to the sauce. Over low heat, cook down the sauce to the consistency you want. Cool and ladle into glass containers to store in freezer.

The result is so delicious you'll never look at those jars of sauce in the supermarket the same way again. This is the sauce I'll use as a base for lasagna, spaghetti, pizza and even chili during the winter. Next year, I'll try heirloom tomatoes. Now I bet they cook up into a delicious sauce....