Thursday, February 11, 2010

Making Sauce From Frozen Tomatoes

Last summer I just plain could not keep up with the tomato canning and ended up doing something that frankly, made me shudder. I froze some tomatoes. I'd read that a lot of people do that when they run out of time. I never really trusted that frozen tomatoes would be any good, and so ended up buying some store bought tomatoes when my own canned ran out two months ago. Of course store bought tomatoes in winter are pretty sad things as well.

So here I am in February, finally using those frozen tomatoes. It turns out they're just fine. They work almost as well as home canned and are about a thousand times better than anything that can be bought out of season. I did fire roast about half of the tomatoes before I froze them and those are actually quite excellent. The other were frozen whole or quartered, without roasting or even blanching. Now I'm glad I didn't bother with blanching. Freezing serves the same purpose, which is to allow the skins to slip off.

I did remove the skins for the first few batches of sauce. Then I thought, why be so picky? You ate store bought tomatoes and didn't die. Surely you can eat the skins from your own homegrown, albeit previously frozen tomatoes. A Vitamix, or some other high speed blender, is key, I suspect, to the success of this venture. You can even blend the tomatoes without defrosting them first. You'll end up with a thick, chilly, bright pink tomato puree that can be cooked into any sauce at all, and those skins don't have to end up in the compost pile. Plus, you save the entire five seconds it would have taken to remove the skins from the tomatoes.

16 comments:

  1. Yea--glad to know this. I'm not going to have bushels of lovely homegrown tomatoes and I'm not going to do any canning, but I will buy a bushel of nice ripe tomatoes to roast and freeze. I bet you could throw in some garlic and onions and basil and have a head start on sauce too.

    Great post!

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  2. Nice post! I had never actually "met" someone who froze tomatoes and succeeded. Good to know for next season.

    I think I will do the same thing you did, roast them first and then freeze them...roasting also seems to help the sugars develop and gives a nice depth of flavor. thank you!!!!

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  3. I always freeze tomatoes to use in sauces and stews. Works perfectly!

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  4. What do you think, could I make pizza sauce from my frozen tomatoes, and then can it?

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  5. I think you could. Let me know how it goes!

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