This recipe is from Beth Case. David and I met the Case family on our trip to Croatia in 2017. We visited them last summer at their place in Montana. They have a huge garden, and we enjoyed the fruit of it, including a delicious tomato sauce on homemade pizza. Beth has a super easy method for the sauce--you just put halved tomatoes in a deep roasting pan with garlic and fresh basil, roast for a couple of hours, and then blend. My own tomato plants are producing abundantly right now, so I turned again to this recipe. This time I added in a sliced onion and a sprinkling of the dried herbs I would use in a simmered sauce: oregano, parsley, and crushed red pepper. If you don't have fresh herbs, you can substitute a heaping teaspoon of basil and parsley. The photo above is everything in the pan, about to go into the oven. You don't need to line the pan with aluminum foil--I just did that because my roasting pan is a little crusty. No need to stir while simmering! No messy stove top from sauce "spitting" out while simmering!
ROASTED TOMATO SAUCE
adapted from a recipe by Beth Case
makes enough for about 8 servings of pasta
Use a roasting pan that is deep, not shallow, so that the sauce doesn't overflow, and that you can take the pan out of the oven without it spilling over the sides. My pan is about 1-3/4" deep.
How many tomatoes to use? One batch of mine weighed in at 5-1/4 lbs, but the exact amount isn't important, so long as it's enough to cover the bottom of the pan. If you have extra tomatoes beyond that, it's fine to put a few more on top.
No need to peel the tomatoes--once the cooked sauce has been blended, there is no trace of the skins.
fresh, unpeeled, tomatoes,
enough to fill a roasting pan, stem end cut out, and tomatoes cut into halves (or thirds or quarters if tomatoes are very
large).
a handful of
fresh basil (or a heaping t. of dried if you don't have fresh)
a handful of
fresh parsley (or a heating t. of dried)
a few cloves
of garlic, cut in half
1 t. dried oregano
1/4 t.
crushed red pepper
1 sliced
onion (optional)
1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2) Put the onion, garlic, herbs, and spices on
the bottom of the roasting pan. (In the photo above, you see all this on top of the tomatoes. The basil dried out in the roasting, though, so next time I'll put all this on the bottom.)
3) Put the
tomatoes on top. Roast for one hour. Add the tomato paste to the sauce--drop spoonfuls around the pan and then stir a bit to blend in. Roast for another hour.
4) Transfer sauce to a large bowl or pot and blend
with an immersion blender. Add water to get to your desired consistency.
This looks delicious!
ReplyDeleteThis would be a lot easier than stirring my stove-top pot every 15 -30 minutes! And the farm stands have been selling "seconds" tomatoes lately that would be perfect for a sauce [for someone with no garden].
ReplyDeleteAlso, does the end result have enough liquid to be used on pasta? And do you remember what volume of sauce you got for whatever size your roasting pan was?