Summer Tomato Sauce

This is a scaled down version of a recipe I'm auditioning for possible large-scale canning.

Last year, I just put up plain tomatoes. They were delicious, but my 9 pint jars really didn't last very long, especially as I'd use two of them every time I made pasta sauce. I'm thinking of cutting out the middle man, so to speak, and just canning sauce. There's not a whole lot you can do with tomato sauce and still use a boiling water canner. Garlic, especially, can be problematic for canning that way.

So I found a recipe for sauce that sounded pretty good in The New Vegetarian Epicure. When I first got this cookbook many years ago, the idea of canning 100 lbs of tomatoes seemed pretty much beyond crazy. Now that I know how fast 30 lb of canned tomatoes gets used up, though, it seems a whole lot more reasonable. If I do end up canning sauce rather than just tomatoes, I think this will be the recipe I'll use. It was really tasty, though to get the consistency I like, I ended up cooking it for about twice the recommended cooking time.

Summer Tomato Sauce
adapted from The New Vegetarian Epicure

• 3 lb ripe tomatoes (at least a quart when chopped)
• 1 Tbsp fruity olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tbsp minced basil leaves
• salt and pepper, to taste

Remove the tomatoes' skins (I use the same process here as I do for peaches). Trim off the stem ends and process briefly with an immersion blender so that there are no whole tomatoes remaining.

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan and add garlic. Cook for about a minute, then add tomatoes, basil, and a little salt and pepper. Cook for about 45 minutes, until the sauce is no longer watery. (If you're cooking down a large batch, this step will take longer.)

yield: about 2 C sauce