Buy some fresh tomatoes. Maybe a bushel. Preferably from a farmer, not from a supermarket. You want vine-ripened. I prefer one or another version of the plum or paste tomato, since they are less juicy and more meaty. However, you can use any kind of tomato—even those with a lot of juice. You’ll just be cooking them down longer.
First I peel the tomatoes. I do this by popping them in boiling water for a minute or so, taking them out and cooling them in cool water and peeling them.
Then, I start the sauce. I peel an onion or two and chop it up. I put in a whole garlic’s worth of cloves, chopped. Fry them a little until the onions are translucent. Then I put in the tomatoes. Sometimes I cut the tomatoes into chunks, and other times I just pop in the tomatoes. Then I cook and cook. I usually put in salt and pepper and (rarely) sugar at this time.
Meanwhile, I get a ton of fresh basil and strip the leaves off. I’d get fresh oregano, too, but the farmer’s market didn’t have it this year; I don’t know why. I also roast and peel a few poblanos (depending on how spicy they are and how spicy I want my sauce). Those get chopped up tiny and thrown in the sauce while it’s cooking.
Eventually it starts to cook down. I like to help it along by skimming off the tomato liquor on the top (with none of the solids). I put this in a cup, and sometimes put a little cream in it and sip while watching the sauce boil. It is the best tomato soup ever!
After a while, when it has cooked down enough (can’t say how to determine that, but usually it’s two or three hours, and I get tired of doing it any more), I throw in the basil and oregano, and cook until the leaves are wilted. I turn off the heat, let it cool, and throw it in containers that I freeze (usually those large yogurt containers).
When it’s time to use it, I take it out of the freezer, heat it, and mix in a small can of tomato paste. That’s because I like my sauce thick. If you like it runny—more like gravy, you don’t have to do this.
I love my tomato sauce!!!
In fact, I love it so much, once I wrote this story about it:
The heat of the summer is one of my favorite food times. It’s the time to make tomato sauce and freeze it for the winter.
There’s an argument for deep fall as the best food time: close to Thanksgiving. But just after Independence Day, the corn starts kicking in. I start to step much more excitedly on Saturday mornings when I go down to the Farmer’s Market at ***** Park. So many years now, I know all the farmers and where they come from, and we’ve talked maple syrup, and the rain in Jersey, farming the bogs, and there’s this guy who grows some of the sweetest corn, this side of heaven. The day the yellow comes in, I always ask, “How is it?” He’ll say, “We had some for dinner last night. It was sweet.” And I’ll buy an extra dozen to freeze.
Last summer, I learned a new trick about the language of food. Everyone’s got heirloom tomatoes now. Big deep red tomatoes with all kinds of wrinkly lines. Yellow tomatoes. Green tomatoes, tomatoes with funny names. And Melanie, she’s the one farming the land her father handed down to her, over in Jersey—the land that got so soaking wet a couple years back, she couldn’t grow any peppers, or something. I don’t know. Sue me. I’m not a farmer. I eat.
So I asked her, “what’s the most tomatoey tomato?” Well she looked at me, and laughed, and another couple looked at me, and I said, “a kind of exercise in hermeutics, isn’t it? You have to imagine what you think a tomatoey tomato is, and then you have to think what I think a tomatoey tomato is, and then see if they match, to make this reccomendation.” The woman in the couple said, “That’s such a U City conversation!” (there’s a big University in the neighborhood).
With respect to the hermeneutics of tomatoisity, Melanie got it right. Cherokee purple. That’s the perfect tomato for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Thick crusty slices of sourdough, lightly toasted. A layer of Nayonaisse. The bacon cooked just crispy, but not too burnt, and not too rubbery, either. I prefer not to bother draining it, because the grease adds a layer of thickness to the tongue, just right. The lettuce—well, I prefer darker, maybe even mixed greens. It goes without saying that iceberg lettuce simply doesn’t even count as food, much less something you would consider as part of a salad or a sandwich!
But the tomatoes? This is the key. They have to be vine ripened. They have to be utterly juicy. And they have to be absolutely tomatoey. Now what the heck does that mean? There are tomatoes that taste like plastic, or crips slices of water. There are mushy tomatoes, that meal over your tongue and make you want to spit up.
The right tomato is firm and so juicy. And it’s flavor is already distilled, even before you cook it (though you would never want to cook a tomato like this). It is sliced thickly, for the sandwich must run with juice. And the flavor must be so intense, that when you close your eyes, and let it spread across your tongue, even as you chew the crispness of the crusty bread, and the slight chewiness of the bacon, and the green cleanness of the lettuce, what is really going on is that the deep, purified tomato flavor of that Cherokee Purple is mingling everything together, and having it make perfect sense, like one of those Eureka moments, when you discover the solution to the problem you’ve been hashing over for years.
However, for tomato sauce, you don’t need those heirlooms, although I’d like to try them, one day, when I’m feeling especially solvent. Plum tomatoes are good, but so are the hybrids that my neighbor always leaves bags crammed full of for me when tomato season suddenly hits, and every vine groans with the weight of the fruit.
So, in addition to Cherokee Purples, Melanie’s got all kinds of other things you need in the sauce. She’s generally got about four different kinds of basil for sale. Standard italian, which is a must, but also a spicy Thai, purplish basil, and a small leafed basil with a very intense, tart, spiciness, as well as a lemony basil. I can’t resist, and I take a bunch of each. Onions, of course. Garlic, too. Maybe some fresh oregano, but while that’s nice, it’s the basil leaves that will infuse the tomatoes, as they cook down, and that is where you get the real flavor for the tomato sauce. Well, except for one more thing.
Poblanos. Now poblanos are, in my opinion, the queen of all peppers. They vary in spiciness, and some can be too mild, and some too spicy, but however hot they are, they deliver that hotness in unique way, unmimicked by any other pepper. If you want real hotness, there are scotch bonnets and habaneros, and even cayenne, but the poblano—while it isn’t as hot—has a texture—that thin, nearly leathery resistance to the teeth, that breaks, quite easily, releasing the oils with overtones of heat and crunchy greenness, all at the same time. Poblanos, that is, that have been roasted, peeled, and deseeded.
I roast and peel and deseed them, and throw them in the freezer, and make them into a block of pepper. Over the rest of the year, as needed, I shave off a bit, and since all the peppers of various hotness are all together, it’s a kind of statistical averaging mechanism that pretty much gets the right amount of heat, all the time.
So, I parboil the plum tomatoes and the hybrids, peel them. Then, I throw them in the pot that is slowly cooking the chopped up onions and garlic in italian, extra virgin olive oil. After the tomatoes are all in, the tomato liquor starts to appear. But before we can taste, we have to strip all the basil leaves off, and throw them in. Stir them in immediately, or they will burn, sitting on top of the tomatoes, and that looks ugly. I put my basil in to cook and many wouldn’t do that, but would put the basil in at the last moment. But, here’s where the magic comes.
With the basil flavors slowly leaching into the tomatoes, and the hotness of the poblanos also mixing in, and you slowly simmer the tomatoes, and there isn’t a peel, anywhere, to be found to ruin the texture, a transformation occurs. The meat of the tomatoes sinks low, but the liquor remains close to the surface. What I recommend, is that you find someone you love, or whom you want to love, invite her to your kitchen, as the sauce is nearing readiness. You tell her to look into the pot, and feel the steam rising on your faces. You take a wooden spoon, dip it flatly on the surface, so only the tomato liquor can spill over the edge into the spoon.
Inviting her closer, so your shoulders press together, you lift the spoon towards your faces, and invite her to blow on the surface with you, to cool it down. Then turn to her, and lift the spoon to her mouth. Tell her to close her eyes. Let her lips part, ever so slightly. Hold the spoon a moment, under her nose, so she can smell the intesity of the tomatoness, then resting the edge of the spoon on her lips, let the spiced orange tomato liquor slide gently onto her tongue. Invite her to just let the flavors mingle with her taste buds a bit, before she swallows. I can’t tell you what will happen next, but I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
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