Scratch-Made Marinara | Recipe
A recipe for simple, Italian marinara sauce made from scratch made using fresh tomatoes.
Here is a little tidbit about my personal life: I married into a family of horticulturalists. Can you guess who doesn’t have a green thumb? Can you also picture me raising and waiving my hand wildly through the air? Well then you guessed right. It is I with no green thumb. I can recall the first time my sweet mother-in-law gave me a plant. My husband and I were dating at the time, and while I was ever-so-touched by the very sweet gesture, I felt a strong need to be honest with her. So, through a smile, I timidly said, “I am not very good with plants….I will probably end up killing it.” But, being the kind soul she is, she assured me it would live, that I could not kill this plant and gave me very clear instructions on how to care for it. I don’t recall quite how long it took me to rid that botanical beauty of its life…but one thing I am certain of is I killed it. I killed it real good. And, also that it didn’t take long for me to do so.
That being said, my husband recently had three large (and very beautiful) raised stone garden beds installed in our backyard. Don’t get me wrong, I adore the idea of living in the semi-country, walking to the garden beds, barefoot through the grass, growing things, picking them and putting them into a little straw basket…but grass makes my feet itch. I mean, if we are telling the truth here, I wear my Hunter boots to take the dog out when the grass is too high. So my point is, while me gardening was an adorable notion, for this gal, not a practical one. So the husband and I made a deal. You plant it, you pick it and I’ll cook it. Naturally he planted 5,000 tomato plants. Don’t get me wrong. I love tomatoes. Especially homegrown tomatoes. Truly, there is nothing like them. However, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when we made that little deal. He was harvesting, without exaggeration, at least 30-40 tomatoes every few days. Luckily, I found the most perfect, most delicious and most flavorful use for all trillion tomatoes, and I plan to share it with you. Fresh Tomato Marinara, get in our bellies.
Ingredients:
30-40 Small/Medium-Sized Vine-Ripened Tomatoes, cores removed and cut into chunks
2 tbsp Olive Oil
2 Yellow Onions, diced
1 tbsp + 1 tsp Kosher Salt, separated
1 tsp + ½ tsp Black Pepper, separated
10 Cloves of Garlic, minced
¼ c Granulated Sugar
½ tsp Red Pepper Flakes
1 tbsp Fresh Basil, min ced
Method:
Place a food mill over a 5 quart mixing bowl. Process the tomatoes into a puree using the coarsest grating disk of your food mill. Once all of the tomatoes have been pureed, set aside until ready to use. You should have roughly 3 ½ to 4 quarts of tomato puree.
Add olive oil to an enameled cast iron Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add onions, 1 tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper and stir. Cover for 5-8 minutes until onions have softened. Remove lid and add garlic. Saute for 1-2 minutes more. Carefully pour in tomato puree, stir in sugar, remaining salt and black pepper, along with the red pepper flakes.
Allow sauce to come to a boil over medium-high heat. Once the sauce comes to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low and allow to simmer for 2-2 ½ hours, and stir every 20 minutes or so.* The sauce should reduce by almost half. About 20 minutes before you remove the sauce from the heat, stir in the minced basil. Serve over pasta, or anything edible really, and enjoy. Freeze the remaining sauce, if desired.**
Makes 6-7 Cups of Sauce
*What is a simmer exactly? Well, a simmer is sort of like a miniature boil. Think of a "roaring" boil. Like, a "right before you add the pasta to the water" kind of boil. Rapidly and repeatedly, big bubbles come to the surface of the water and pop. A simmer is like this, just on a smaller scale. But, instead of big giant bubbles, think small streaming bubbles.
**Have ready multiple freezer-safe zip-top bags. I usually ladle 2 cups of remaining sauce in each bag. This way we get more than one use out of the leftovers. Lay bags flat on a small sheet pan and place in the freezer. This method makes dethawing much quicker. Once frozen, remove sheet pan and store sauce in the freezer for up to three months.
