Homemade Tomato Sauce

After putting up quite a few tomatoes with peppers with onions, I decided to attempt homemade pizza sauce.  After finding how much we all liked it I decided I wanted to put up marinara/pizza sauce.  Now my garden is about done on tomatoes so I went looking for another source.  I bought 50 pounds of tomatoes from a local farm stand and got started. 

First, I washed my kitchen sink really well and fill it with tomatoes while I brought a big pot of water to boil.  I poured the boiling water over the tomatoes.  This will help to make the skins peel off easily.


 After peeling, I sqeezed each tomatoes to get out a lot of the seeds and juice.This will make the sauce thicker and help it to cook down to the consistency I want much quicker.  I decided to use the crock pot and the a big pot on the stove since I was doing so many.  The crock pot was slower, but it worked!

 The peels went to the compost and to the worm bin!

 I pureed the tomatoes to get the consistency I wanted and then cooked it down.

I added garlic and basil from my garden and cooked until my desired consistency.  After it reached the thickness I wanted, I poured it into jars and used my pressure canner to properly can the sauce, including adding lemon juice as recommended.  I also canned some of the tomato juice that I squeezed from the tomatoes.  (I strained it first through a fine mesh strainer to remove the seeds.)  I’m thinking maybe I’ll use the juice for soups – so wishing I could get my kids to eat more soups!
When it was all said and done I had 9 quarts of tomato sauce!  It looks so lovely and I can’t wait to eat it!  My kids would happily eat spaghetti every week, so this won’t last us through the winter.  However, since I had to purchase the tomatoes it really isn’t cost effective to make the sauce this way…..but if I can grow more tomatoes next year, I know how to put them to good use next year!
My pantry, garage stockpile shelf and freezer are all brimming over, so the jars are stuffed here and there in various places!  These were the ones behing the chips and bread in the pantry!
 

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