I’ve been getting pretty good at a quick, weeknight evening tomato sauce, but I have really been wanting to make a thick, slow cooking sauce that simmers and has a deeper richer flavor.  Today was my day.

 
While I do have a number of tomatoes from my CSA boxes, I decided to use my volunteer tomatoes – which are still coming and turning ripe.  Since these are smaller tomatoes, I was trying to figure out how I would use them without having to scald and then peel each tomato because I didn’t want tomato skins in the sauce.

I had seen a recipe for making sauce with cherry tomatoes that didn’t peel them, so I decided to jump in.  I had just under 3 lbs. of these tomatoes, I tossed them with 1/4 c. olive oil and 2 t. minced garlic.

I heated these on low in a non-stick dutch oven, until all the tomatoes had burst.

I came up with the bright idea of pressing the tomatoes through my ricer, which would separate the skins from rest of the tomato without me having to peel each tomato.

Now, I’m not sure why I didn’t have the foresight to realize there may be a certain amount of splatter while pressing hot tomatoes through the ricer. But I started this process wearing my favorite long sleeved WHITE t-shirt.  😦  I quickly figured out that I had made a mistake, and changed into a nice red t-shirt.

The ricer worked great!

After all the tomatoes were pressed and the skins discarded, I returned the pressed sauce to the dutch oven which still had olive oil and garlic and some tomato juice in it.

I returned the sauce to a boil then reduced the heat, added sea salt, pepper and 2 t. dried oregano, and allowed the sauce to simmer for 1-1/2 hours, until it was reduced to about 1/2.

The end result is a thick, really flavorful tomato sauce that would be great on pasta, on a pizza, or as a base for a soup.  I will freeze it to use later, when we have no fresh tomatoes.

Sometimes, I like to add  a little balsamic vinegar to add another layer of complexity to the flavor.