Making Fresh Tomato Sauce
To make a vibrant and tasty tomato sauce, you first need to ensure that you have gotten very fresh ingredients and of good quality. This helps a lot in enabling you take less time in cooking your sauce. The cooking is meant to reduce the liquid part of the fresh ingredients and thicken the sauce. Since some ingredients will only give their best when cooked, it will be very important to make sure that you get all the steps right when cooking.
Besides having a number of sizable fresh tomatoes, there are other ingredients that you will need to add flavor. You will need sweet onions which are thinly diced, olive oil, garlic, basil and salt pepper. Carrots and celery can as well be added to add onto the details of the taste you intend to achieve. These ingredients are optional and will depend on what you prefer to have in your sauce as well as what your main serving entails.
A good tomato sauce will need tomatoes which are as ripe as possible. Be sure to cut out the upper scar of your tomato because at times they are hard to cook. If you do not mind having seeds in your sauce, you can use them but if you do, scoop or squeeze them out after cutting out the scar.
After this, put your tomatoes in boiling water for about five minutes for their skin to loosen. You will observe this as you turn them around in the boiling water. When the skin loosens, put them in a basin with cold water so that you can peel them without getting burnt.
Using a sharp knife, remove the skin of the tomatoes and then cut them into halves. This will give you a better opening to remove anything that you do not need in your tomatoes. When it is ready and in the way that you want it, cut it into a coarse dice or strips. This is meant to ease the cooking.
The tomatoes are now ready for cooking. Heat the olive oil you have in a saucepan and then add the onions. Sauté the onions till they become translucent and soft. Throw in some garlic and cook till you get its fragrance. Put in your tomatoes and half basil. Season your cooking with pepper and salt. Subject this cooking to low heat and let it cook for about half an hour. You will check the thickening of your sauce to know when it is prepared. When the thickening matches what you needed, know that it is ready.
A ready tomato sauce is characterized by a lively red color and the right thickening. Any excess liquid is an indication that you should let it continue cooking.
When you get your sauce ready for use, do not put spoonfuls of the sauce on your meals. Dress whatever you are serving with a light amount of the tomato sauce, and the magic you will gain will be out of this world.
