Homemade tomato sauce

Normally, by this time of year, I am all done with canning all my tomatoes into sauce, but this cool summer has made the tomatoes take forever getting ripe. I still have a bunch of tomatoes on the vines to pick today and have a bunch that I picked 2 days ago to can. Lots of them have cracking thanks to the wet spring and summer we had, but the fruit is still good.

This year I tried a new tomato instead of my normal roma tomatoes. Burpee has a Super Sauce tomato that I decided to try out. I ordered 9 plants (I can never get them to grow by seed for some reason). I also got 3 of their new Steakhouse Hybrid tomato. It was okay. It didn't grow fruit as large as they said it could. I had bigger and more fruit from the regular Big Boy tomato plant that my neighbor gave me. But the Super Sauce I will be doing again. The fruit is HUGE. I mean look at it compared to my hand. And this wasn't even the biggest one picked. They are full of meat, very little seed. I have my dad and sister adding these babies to their to buy list for next year.

I don't do anything special or put anything into the sauce, it is just tomatoes. I add seasoning and other veggies to it when I am making a pasta dinner. Last year I had to freeze up my tomatoes because we had them coming in sporadically all summer. This year, they are coming ripe in huge lots, so it is making it easier to process.

First thing I do is peel the skin off. I have a seed/skin strainer that I can use, but it caused me issues last year, so I just skipped it. Instead, I just put the tomatoes, 4 or 5 at a time because they are so huge, in a pot of boiling water for 3 minutes. The skin starts to crack that that point.

Once this is done, I put the tomatoes into ice water to make them cool enough to handle. The skin comes off really easy. I trim off the tops and slice the tomatoes in half. I have had both my crock pots going at the same time full of tomatoes to cook down.

I cook them over night on low and then smash them with a potato masher. Then I leave the crock pot lid off a crack to let the extra water cook off. I like a thicker sauce. Once the tomatoes have the right consistency for me, I puree them using my immersion blender. Then the canning of them starts.

I can them in pints. I add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to each jar and fill the jars up with the sauce leaving a 1/2 inch head space. Then I water bath can them for 30 minutes. Easy peasy.