How-to 6: Make Basic Fresh Tomato Sauce

There's nothing quite like homegrown, organic tomatoes fresh from the vine!

Tomato sauce is such as well-known and loved ingredient in so many dishes such as lasagne and other pasta sauces, soups, pizza toppings etc. If like us, you had a late glut of homegrown toms,  I suggest that sauces (which can then be frozen if not using immediately) are the way to go to make sure they all get used up. This sauce is so easy and delicious, especially if you have a blender, that you'll never want to go back to canned tomatoes or passata again. For one quantity of tomato sauce (serves approximately 4-5  people in a main dish such as pasta ), you will need:

   1.25kg fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped
   3 dried bay leaves
   1/2 tsp compound hing
   1 tsp seasalt
   1 tsp gour/ jaggery (for information about this ingredient, click here)
   1/2 tab extra-virgin olive oil
   (Anything else you like such as basil, oregano, chilli, etc, can be added later as your recipe requires.)

1: Wash and roughly chop your tomatoes

2: Blitz in the blender or processor so that the skin and most of the seeds  "disappear".  By hand, you can skin and de-seed the tomatoes then mash them in the pan with a potato masher. 

3: Now get together the oil, salt, hing, black pepper, bay leaves and gour...

...and pop them with the pulverised tomatoes into a shallow pan  (they will reduce quicker that way).

4: Simmer until reduced by about half, stirring from time to time to prevent burning. For pizza sauce, thicken further. The sauce will darken as it thickens.
And that's all there is to it!

So how will you use your tomato sauce? As soup, with pasta, on a pizza? I'd love to know...