Wondering what to do with all those tomatoes from your garden?

Make sauce!

Some folks will tell you that you have to use only certain types of tomatoes to make sauce and I’m here to bust that myth. I make sauce out of any and every kind of tomato I grow. I also don’t bother to peel or seed them! If you have a really good blender, then the seeding and peeling becomes unnecessary. I just throw it all in my Vitamix and I’m good to go. This saves so much time.

I often do this with just the fresh raw tomatoes, it makes the most amazing fresh tomato sauce you can imagine. A few garlic cloves, a little salt, some basil leaves if you like - blend it all until smooth and serve. This also freezes really well, and it’s wonderful to have that fresh taste of summer in the middle of a long, cold winter.

But today I’m going to tell you about roasted tomato sauce.

Roasting the tomatoes is an amazing way to bring out flavor, some of these garden tomatoes get so sweet and jammy with roasting that they are practically like candy. I actually have a hard time resisting just snacking on them right off the tray.

This isn’t so much a recipe as it is just some general guidelines. I don’t know what type and size and quantity of tomatoes you have - but it really doesn’t matter.

Here’s how to make simple roasted tomato sauce:

1) Cut your tomatoes into roughly similar size chunks. Cherry or grape tomatoes are usually left whole, smaller Romas I maybe cut in half, bigger tomatoes might need to be cut in several pieces.

2) Drizzle some oil over a sheet pan - I like to do this with a mixture of avocado oil for temperature tolerance and a nice olive oil for flavor.

3) Toss all the tomatoes on the sheet pan and stir them around a bit to get coated with oil, drizzle a bit more over the top if you like.

4) Add a few peeled garlic cloves.

5) Sprinkle salt generously over the top of the whole thing.

6) Stick the pan in the oven - I do mine on about 375 convection, but if you don’t have a convection oven you might want to try 400 degrees.

7) Check the tomatoes after about 15-20 minutes, maybe give them a stir, and keep cooking, checking again in 5-ish minute increments until you think they look ready. You can see the pic below of what mine look like. You want to start getting some browning and caramelization, maybe a few even darker edges but not too much, those cherry tomatoes should burst, some of the juices should start to reduce, the garlic should get a little browned and soft.

8) When you are satisfied with how the tomatoes look, take them out and let them cool for a bit.

9) Dump the whole thing into your high powered blender and puree until smooth. Taste and decide if you want to add more salt, or some fresh garlic, or a little basil or other herbs.

That’s it. Sounds like a lot of steps but it’s really quite easy. If you have a good blender then you shouldn’t have many whole seeds left, and a few little seeds don’t bother me. But if you’re going to be bothered by a few seeds you could put this through a food mill.