Tomato Sauce
Making your own sauce is a GREAT budget saver!
Ingredients:
(Makes 3 bottles)
• 2kg ripe tomatoes, peeled* and diced
• 300g brown onions, roughly chopped
• 20g minced or finely diced garlic
• 1/2TS minced ginger (make your own by grating fresh ginger and adding water to make a paste)
• 300g apples (peeled, cored & diced)
• 2TBS salt
• 300g sugar
• 1/3 cup vinegar*
• Ground black pepper, Clove essential oil (or ground clove) and chilli powder to taste*
• Optional: Tomato paste (for colour)
Method:
1. Wash tomatoes & apples in sink full of water with a good scoop of sodium bicarbonate and a few drops of Lemon essential oil to remove pesticides (if not buying organic – both are in the dirty dozen and are some of the most heavily sprayed produce with pesticides), and dirt.
2. Add tomatoes, onions, garlic & ginger to large pot and boil, stirring/squishing frequently, for 30-60 minutes.
3. When soft, add apples and continue to boil until apples are soft.
4. Preheat oven to 100 degrees Celsius (or as low as your oven will go).
5. In the meantime, wash bottles* and lids in soapy water. Scratch any sticky labels from outside of bottles with back of butter knife after soaking. If any sticky residue remains, add a few drops of Lemon or Lemongrass, rub in, sit for 5 minutes then wash/wipe away. Rinse bottles with hot, kettle boiled water then add to preheated oven (just before bottling the sauce) to dry and sterilise. Rinse lids, add to bowl and boil kettle ready to pour over lids just before bottling the sauce.
6. When apples are soft, blitz sauce (in batches) in a blender until most lumps are gone (optional: sieve out any lumps and seeds) then return to large pot.
7. Add salt, sugar, vinegar, black pepper, clove & chilli (plus tomato paste if adding).
8. Simmer until thick enough to bottle.
Bottling:
• Pour hot, kettle water over lids.
• Grab a bottle out of the oven (using oven mitts or towel) and sit on chopping board or towel.
• Sit funnel in neck of bottle, add sauce* to a glass measuring jug and pour into bottle to the brim.
• Grab a lid (with tongs) and seal straight away.
• Let cool on bench, store in cupboard until opened, then store in the refrigerator.
*Notes:
1. To peel tomatoes: (after washing) Add to large pot of hot, boiling (speeds up process if boil kettle a couple of times) water until skin cracks (the riper the tomatoes the quick the process) then transfer to sink of cold water and peel skin with your hands.
2. Vinegar, ground black pepper, ground clove/clove essential oil & chilli powder can be substituted for 1/3 cup of EzySauce however, there is one unideal ingredient (food acid 260) in it.
3. Save any bottles you get from the supermarket or go to your local op shop (they always have bottles cheap). See through is preferable so you can see if the sauce has spoiled.
4. If you let sauce cool too much and/or sterilise bottles in oven too hot, when you go to bottle the sauce the bottle can crack, so test a small batch first so you don’t waste a lot of sauce if it does crack.
Enjoy