How To Make The Best Tomato Sauce Ever

This incredible tomato sauce uses almost the entire tomato to bring a huge amount of flavor to any dish that includes it. We like to make this in the summer and early fall when fresh tomatoes are available in the greenhouse and at the Farmers Markets. You can make this with any kind of tomatoes; plum, beefsteak, heirloom, etc, or even a combination will all yield good results.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making the Best Tomato Sauce Ever:

Ingredients For The Best Tomato Sauce

• 8 Fresh Tomatoes, Home Grown or Farmers’ Market
• Olive Oil
• 6 Cloves of Garlic, chopped

Blanch the Tomatoes

We will start by blanching our tomatoes. This will make it easier to remove the skins and seeds. It is not a difficult process and it goes pretty quickly. We start by cutting a shallow ‘X’ in the top and then the bottom of each tomato with a sharp knife.

Boil Them Briefly Then Into Ice Water

After that we put the tomatoes in a pot of boiling water. We will blanch them for 30 to 60 seconds until the peels start to lift away from the flesh. Then we put them immediately into a bowl of ice water.

Peel the Tomatoes and Boil the Peels

After cooling in the ice water the tomatoes will be ready to peel. We like to use a cutting board with a trough around the edge as this can get pretty juicy and we want to catch all the juice. We will remove the peels from the tomatoes and then put them in a small saucepan. Then we will put a little bit of water into the saucepan, cover it and put it on a burner over low heat.

Squeeze the Seeds From the Tomatoes and Reserve Them

Once the peels have been removed we want to slice the tomatoes into quarters before squeezing the seeds out of them. Do this over a bowl so you capture all the seeds and the juicy parts of the tomato. This is a gloriously messy job and we just go all in, pushing our fingers through the tomato to squeeze all the seeds out.

Cut the Tomatoes

After removing the seeds we will cut the tomato into pieces.

Heat Oil and Add garlic

Now we are ready to cook our sauce. We will start with the only other ingredients we will be using besides the tomatoes. Heat some oil in a saucepan over medium heat and then add the garlic.

Add the Tomatoes

We’ll let that cook for 30 seconds or so and then add the tomatoes.

Strain the Seeds, Add the Juice to the Sauce

After we get the tomatoes in the pan we want to strain the seeds through a fine mesh strainer. There is a lot of useful juice and edible tomato attached to the seeds and this has a different flavor than the firmer flesh. We want to get as much of this in our sauce as we can so we push this through until there is only a pile of seeds left in the strainer. Then we will put the resulting juice into our tomato sauce and discard the seeds.

Strain the Skins, Add the Paste to the Sauce

By this time our tomato skins will have cooked for a while. We will put those in our strainer and work them with a serving spoon, getting as much tomato paste off them as we can. Then we put the paste into our tomato sauce. This will add a bit of richness to the flavor of our sauce. After you’ve gotten what you can from them, discard the peels.

Let The Sauce Cook

Now we just want to let our sauce cook down to a thick, rich tomato sauce. You won’t need to stir it a lot for the first hour or so but after it starts to thicken you’ll need to stir fairly frequently.

Cook It Way Down

You will need to decide how much water you want to leave in the sauce. We like to cook this down until it is a thick, concentrated sauce. Then we can use it on pasta, use it in a caprese tart or in any recipe that calls for tomato sauce. We get about one cup of sauce out of eight tomatoes.

If we are not using this sauce right away we will freeze it in Souper Cubes for later. This sauce is great for serving on gluten free pasta, Barilla makes the best we have found. We also use it in our Camarones a la Diabla recipe.

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