I try to grow a lot of paste tomatoes every year. I use those tomatoes to make tomato sauce. You can use tomato sauce to make various things, I use it to make pasta sauce.
For the past few years, I've been growing my 2 favorite paste type tomatoes in the greenhouse. I grow Roma tomatoes and the heirloom Amish Paste tomatoes. I usually also try at least 1 other variety every year to see how they grow for me. In the past, I've grown San Marzano paste tomatoes, but I tend to have more problems with blossom end rot with those than the other types, so I quit growing them. This year, I'm trying 2 new varieties, the heirloom Blue Beech tomato, and the hybrid Big Mamma tomato.
I have found that the Blue Beech tomatoes get pretty big, but they ripen a bit unevenly. Some get fully ripe, and some get ripe on the bottom half while still having yellow shoulders by the stem. That's not really much of a problem for me, I just cut out the bits that aren't ripe before I process them. The nice thing about them is that they're mostly meat, they have small seed cavities.
The hybrid Big Mamma tomato I'm not sure about because they're just starting to get ripe now and I haven't had a chance to process any of them yet. They look like a big Amish Paste tomato in their shape. These seem to be a bit more of a late season tomato, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
As for making tomato sauce, obviously you have to pick the tomatoes first. Once I've picked enough ripe tomatoes to process a batch for sauce, I set up my tomato processor. I use a Victorio model 200 food strainer for processing the tomatoes. I bought this thing last year, and found that it saves me a lot of time with processing tomatoes. You don't have to cook or peel the tomatoes before putting them through this tool. I just wash the tomatoes and cut out the stem end, then I cut the tomato in half top to bottom to check for blossom end rot. I also remove bad spots before I process the tomatoes.
This is the processor. It has a big screw inside of a metal screen inside the plastic housing. The screw forces the pulp through the screen, while pushing the seeds and skins out of the end of the processor.
This is what it looks like when you use it.
This is after running a bunch of tomatoes through it.
Here's a look at the strainer screen as I'm scraping it off to clean the outside of it. You can see how the tomato pulp is pushed through the holes in the strainer.
Processing tomatoes with this tool is a lot less messy than the other methods that I've used.
I pour all the tomato juice into a large heavy bottom stainless steel pot to cook it down into sauce.
The cooking down process is pretty simple. I put the burner on a fairly low heat setting so that the juice is barely boiling. You just want to steam the excess water out of the juice until it thickens up to the consistancy that you want. I stirr it regularly to keep the stuff from sticking to the bottom. The heavy bottom pot really helps to keep from burning the sauce as it gets thicker, it spreads the heat much better than a thin bottom pot.
Once the sauce is cooked down to the thickness that I want, I add the various ingredients that I use to make the pasta sauce. There's so many different recipes for pasta sauce, everyone has their own favorite. For instance, I don't like as much garlic as some other people do, and I like a bit more sugar than some other people might. It's really just a matter of taste.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for checking it out!
