I grew up Italian-American, eating some variety of pasta tomato sauce multiple times a week, plus some homemade pizza (with dough purchased from the same place for 25-30 years), but I didn’t grow up with a family tomato sauce recipe, and even into adulthood, when I made it from scratch, I’d almost always use canned tomatoes – which, out of season, are the better option anyway. (For years, when I would only need a small amount of sauce for pizza, I’d buy a jar of good sauce that had zero added sugar; Trader Joes has one that’s excellent for that.)
The last few years, however, we’ve grown so many tomatoes that we can’t eat them fast enough, and I’ve started getting into making sauce from fresh tomatoes. It’s not difficult, although the two things you need are time and a food mill, and I fully understand that some people have neither. It is amazing how different the finished product can be when you start with fresh tomatoes – and, contrary to what every cookbook and almost everything on the internet has told me, you can make a good sauce from any tomatoes you grow.
So here’s my current iteration of sauce from fresh tomatoes, as simple as I can make it, with six ingredients, one optional. It’ll keep a week-plus in the fridge and freezes for much longer, although I always use it up within a few days. You do need a food mill to get the skins off fresh tomatoes; you can follow the same ratio with canned tomatoes, but can hand-crush them if you’re willing to live with a few extra seeds, and I would probably simmer it for a shorter time because they’ve already been ‘cooked’ once in the canning process.
Tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes
2-3 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes (the smaller the tomatoes, the more total weight you want)
1 onion, diced
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
Salt
¼ cup vodka (optional)
1-3 tsp minced thyme, to taste
1. Put all tomatoes in a saucepan or skillet with a cover over medium heat. Cook about ten minutes, covered, shaking the pan often to prevent sticking or scorching, until the tomatoes have started to burst their skins.
2. Pour everything – tomatoes, skins, juices, whatever – into a food mill set over a bowl large enough to hold at least 3 cups of liquid. Mill everything until no more pulp comes through the disc. (I have two discs for my food mill and I use the one with smaller holes for this.) Set the bowl aside and toss or compost the skins and seeds left in the food mill.
3. In the same pan, add the olive oil and sweat the diced onion with a pinch of salt over low heat until translucent, 7-10 minutes. You don’t want any browning here.
4. Add the milled tomatoes, the thyme, and the vodka (if using) and simmer 30 minutes to 1 hour over medium-low, stirring often, until the sauce is visibly thickened. The ultimate consistency is up to you, but there’s a lot of water to evaporate here. You can also skip the mincing and throw thyme sprigs in the sauce for the whole simmering stage, then discard them, if you don’t have time or prefer not to have the leaves in the sauce.
5. Season to taste with more salt, and black pepper if desired.
That’s all I use – no garlic, no basil (I love it, but it can overpower the tomatoes here), no cheese, and absolutely no sugar. I know sugar is a contentious topic in tomato sauces, and maybe if you’re using out-of-season tomatoes that have less sugar in them, you might want to add it … but I hate what sucrose does to the flavor and texture of tomato sauce. It’s cloying, and I think that because it’s hygroscopic it tightens up the sauce’s consistency. I want my tomato sauce to taste like tomatoes.
That’s just my palate, though. This is a template for a tomato sauce. You can add garlic if you want. Or crushed red pepper. (Add enough, or maybe use fresh chilies, and you’ll get an arrabbiata sauce. But you’ll need a tray.) Start with 4 ounces of diced guanciale or pancetta, drain the fat, set the meat aside, then add ¼ heavy cream at the end before adding back the meat, substituting basil for thyme, and you have pasta alla vodka. Skip the cream and alcohol, use guanciale/pancetta, add a lot of black pepper to serve, and you have pasta all’amatriciana. You can swap in white wine for the vodka; it’ll be sweeter and a little tangier, but the alcohol will still boost the flavor by liberating some alcohol-soluble compounds in the tomatoes.
I also use whatever shows up in the garden, which is always a mixture of red and yellow tomatoes, varying from grape and pear tomatoes up to round ones the size of a racquetball. Yellow tomatoes are less acidic than red, so I wouldn’t go more than half yellow because I’d worry the sauce would be too bland and might spoil faster. Yellows are also sweeter than red tomatoes, which further reduces the need for adding any sugar. You can make a pretty great uncooked sauce from yellow tomatoes, come to think of it, although I haven’t done that in ages.
Anyway, I hope that’s helpful to someone. If you’ve got your own method – or something passed down from your ancestors – I’d love to hear it.
(not their GF baking mix) and adding 1/8 tsp 
for structure produced a brownie that looked and tasted just like the original version did, with only the slightest hint afterwards that something was different. (You can get both of those ingredients at Whole Foods.)
– and she kept asking about marmalade, since she’d never had any. Of course, I read a book set in London that involves marmalade and I think true English marmalade, which is made with bitter oranges (like Sevilles), so I pick up a few blood oranges (also bitter, but I think less so than Sevilles) and make some gorgeous but definitely bitter orange marmalade, which my daughter, of course, does not like. So now I have nearly two pints of the stuff and no idea what to do with it.
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