This bought back memories of the same time last year, when we spent a nice day together in the kitchen making tomato sauce. Then a not so nice solo Monday -a full 14 hours over a spluttering stove top, followed by 23 bottles of tomato sauce.
Sauce requires company.
We still had a couple of bottles of sauce let over from last year, so we thought this time we would make a couple of different varieties. Our recipe is Roasted Tomato Passata from Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No. 2, which also has a recipe for Roasted Tomato Sauce using the passata. We have a smoker oven so we thought we could adapt the recipe slightly and make a smoked tomato passata, use that to make a smoked tomato sauce then pump out a casual tomato chutney on the side.
 |
| All tomatoes were laid out on baking sheets with fresh herbs, garlic, shallots and salt and pepper. |
 |
| Before and after shots of the tomatoes in the smoker with fresh Oregon wood chips. |
 | |||||
| The passata is getting passed through a sieve on the right. Meanwhile the sauce ingredients are ready to cook up on the induction plate on the left. |
We sieved all of the tomatoes for the passata. For the tomato sauce we kept the smoked tomatoes, shallots and herbs whole as we are fans of chunky tomato sauce.
 |
| Passata, tomato sauce, chutney and Troy's pickles stored for the winter. |
I wonder how long these bad boys will sit unlabeled. It's on the to do list, but I guess it comes down to blog posts versus sauce in our laundry looking pretty.
Verdict: We made a simple pasta for dinner with some of the passata and some extra smoked tomatoes and its a really lovely base to work from.
Would we make this again? It's time consuming, but really rewarding. It's always nice being able to pull a preserve out of the cupboard to use for a recipe, knowing exactly where it came from, or even better, to give to friends in exchange for some of their creations.
No comments:
Post a Comment