Homemade Pizza Sauce

Our tomatoes are starting to come in and I picked up a few more when I went to the Mennonite market in Delano, TN. Last year I started roasting my tomatoes for my tomato sauce and it made a big difference in the taste. Here’s how I do it:

I wash and cut up my vegetables and place them on a baking tray that has been sprayed with olive oil cooking spray. I roast them at 425 degrees until they look like this….

I roasted another pan of juicier tomatoes. I put them together in a container to get them ready to send through the food mill. I used some of the juice from the other pan to get the fond off of this baking sheet.

Then I put everything through the food mill on the fine setting. (I have an OXO Good Grips food mill and it is really great.)

When I got to this step, I stopped for the night. The sauce looked like this…

The next morning, I picked a couple of basil stems and washed them well and removed the flowers.

I put the basil in the sauce and put the sauce in the oven at 300 degrees for about 3 hours until it was the consistency I was looking for.

Here’s what it looked like after I pulled the basil out…

As you can see, there was a lot of browning and it reduced by quite a bit. Again, I didn’t want to lose the flavor from the browning so I used the sauce to soften up the browned bits on the side of the pan.

I followed the instructions from the Ball Blue Book to can it. You need to add lemon juice or citric acid to the sauce to keep it food safe in storage. This made about 6 cups of pizza sauce, or 12 tiny jars.

Doing so much of the cooking in the oven improves the flavor considerably, is less messy, and requires less hands on time. I recommend it!