Heirloom Tomato Sauce
If you have a summer crop of heirloom tomatoes, you may be trying to figure out how to keep them from going to waste when they all ripen at the same time….I don’t know about you, but I could use a lot more problems like this one 😀
Heirloom tomatoes are more watery and luscious than many other types of tomatoes, but it’s possible to make them into a delicious and thick sauce, with very few other ingredients needed. As a bonus, you’ll also get a fresh tomato heart salad along the way! You can use this recipe for any type of fresh tomatoes, not just heirlooms, and you can freeze it too.
6-10 tomatoes
1/2 yellow onion, diced
1 head of garlic (peel and dice all the cloves)
2 bay leaves
fresh basil (if you have some)
1 cup white wine
olive oil
salt
Heat your oven to 350 and pour some olive oil on a baking sheet. Core the tomatoes and cut them in half. Using a sharp, serrated knife, cut the centers out of the tomatoes so you are left with just the thick outside skin portion. (Chop all these centers into bite-sized pieces and put them in a bowl: later you can mix in some sliced onion, olive oil, red wine vinegar, lemon juice and salt for a luscious heirloom tomato heart salad!)
Arrange the tomatoes on the cookie sheet with the cut sides up and sprinkle diced garlic over them. Drizzle more olive oil on top and roast them for 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, pour a generous coating of olive oil in a heavy saucepan and saute the diced onion and the rest of the diced garlic for about 10 minutes. Add the cup of white wine and reduce for another 10 minutes. Then turn off the heat and let it sit until the tomatoes are done roasting. You probably have a spare half hour here now, so go ahead and make your tomato heart salad and use up a few of those minutes (add some thin sliced red or yellow onion and chopped fresh basil to the bowl of heirloom hearts, and pour some olive oil and red wine vinegar onto them. Squeeze in a quarter of a lemon, add some salt, and stir all together.)
When they’re roasted, take the tomatoes out of the oven, let them cool a bit, and then pull the skins off and put them in a separate bowl, and drop the tomatoes into the saucepan. Scrape up all the extra garlic from the baking sheet and put that in the saucepan too. Add the bay leaves and the fresh basil (let the basil stay on the stems and don’t bother chopping at all, you’ll remove it at the end.) Strain the skins through a mesh strainer and add their juice to the saucepan also. Bring the sauce to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Add salt to your taste at the end (I find heirloom tomato sauce naturally sweet, so I add a fair bit of salt) and remove all the leaves. If you want your sauce smooth, you can blend it in a blender or with a stick blender–I usually opt to keep it textured.
Enjoy over pasta or polenta, or freeze for when you’re missing your summer garden!
