Now, there’s an interesting idea – could a few hawthorn berries be combined with a batch of juicy tomatoes to make a good spaghetti sauce? It seems like that might work quite well, in theory. That may be a good way to use up a bucketload of spare cherry tomatoes, for instance.
3 Likes
Oh your thinking spagehetti sauce, I was thinking Fruity/melon Tropical Flavored Fruits that just happen to be tomatoes, those that taste nothing like the classic funky tomato flavor.
That being said, doesn’t spaghetti sauce require oil to make it silky like that? Otherwise it might turn into somekind of funky tomato flavored jam
1 Like
Oil? I’ve never put oil into spaghetti sauce. There wasn’t any in the recipes I looked up when I first tried it, either. When I make spaghetti sauce, it’s just tomatoes, basil, garlic, and oregano, and I use a blender to make it smooth.
Also, spaghetti sauce is basically tomato jam – we just don’t think of it that way because we don’t put sugar into it. 
3 Likes
I have occasionally but rarely had “tomato sauce” that was fit to eat, so I invented my own. Squeeze out most of the seeds and chop up some fresh meaty tomatoes and through them in a little hot olive oil along with good amount of onion, some garlic and a bit of celery. Stir it all around a bit till it starts to brown a little. I like a nice robust red tomato.
Turn the heat way down, throw in some herbs and put the lid on. I like sweet marjoram and or thyme the best although winter savory is also good. It’s anything but smooth, but it has flavors.
4 Likes
That sounds nice! I can see frying the tomatoes first being a really nice step to bring out the flavor.
That’s much healthier. I just look at almost all of the Spagheti or Mariana Sauces at the grocery store & all of them have oil. I though it’s what gives it the nice smooth silky texture & adds richness. I tried a tomato basil sauce without oil & it just doesn’t spread as nicely hence why I thought oil was a requirement.
How do you make your spaghetti sauce spreadable? Will Pectin do the trick?
OH? Wait so that means you also get to save your seeds as a bonus?
So your sauce is more like a chunky salsa with Tomato as the main bulk? It’s ironic that “Salsa” in Spanish translates into “Sauce” in English but in America Salsa vs Sauce are different.
Oh, yeah, I always save the seeds out of the tomatoes when I’m making sauce. Here is my process:
-
I put a tomato into a bowl of hot water and leave it there for around ten seconds. (I’ll leave a tomato in longer as the water gets gradually cooler over time. The water generally starts out hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch, but not quite boiling.)
-
I use a large serving spoon with holes in it to lift the tomato out and put it on a cutting board.
-
I pull off the skin, which now peels off easily because of the hot water. The interior is still cool to the touch, so I presume the seeds are unaffected.
-
I remove the seeds and drop them into a cup. (All the fruits’ seeds will go in that same cup.)
-
I drop the tomato meat into a bowl and move on to the next one.
At the end, I will have a bowl full of tomato skins (to compost), a bowl full of tomato seeds (to save), and a bowl full of tomato meat (to cook into sauce).
It’s a lot of extra work to save seeds from tomatoes rather than just dropping them into a bowl to cook them, but I usually consider it worth it. 
My spaghetti sauce is spreadable because I blend it until it’s smooth. It’s basically just a fruit puree. It can be chunky if you don’t blend it for long, like apple sauce, or it can be silky smooth if you blend it for a long time, like apple butter.
Speaking of which, if you ever buy chunky tomato sauce and wanted it to be smooth, just stick it in a blender. That’ll smooth it out for you.
3 Likes
wow! Seriously, Hot water makes peeling tomato skins off easily?
Thus your tomato sauces doesn’t have fibrous or the bad textured skin? Is this only for Grocery Store tomatoes with Thick Skin or are the thin skin tomato varieties good without peeling for sauce making?
Awesome! I’m so glad all it takes is a very good blender, thank you for sharing your knowledge & experience in making tomato sauces.
Hold up… does this mean Yellow Tomatoes make Yellow Sauce, Green makes Green Sauces & Purple will make … Purple sauce?
And can I use any tomato for sauce, not just the roma/paste types with meaty textues?
1 Like
Yup! I learned the trick of how to peel off the skin from a video with a chef. I think it’s all tomatoes that the skin can peel off easily, but I’m not sure. It’s probably true of all the paste types. I used Roma and Amish Paste tomatoes that I’d grown.
Yep, you can use any tomatoes to make tomato sauce – it’ll just be watery and need to have a lot of water evaporated if you use a juicy tomato. So that’s why I was thinking a few hawthorns thrown in there might bulk the sauce out instead of having to boil all that water off.
Presumably different colored tomatoes would make different colored sauces. I’ve tried with yellow tomatoes, and the sauce was yellow.
So, yes, you have a lot of options for making tomato sauce!
1 Like
Freezing and then blanching while still frozen makes it even easier.
1 Like
Does that affect the flavor of the tomato flesh at all, or the viability of the seeds?
Have you tried peeling off all the green? If you remove all except the pretty yellow petals, they are sweet and mild. It’s a labor of love, though.
I grew up learning how to can tomatoes from my mother, using this hot water method to remove the skins. I suppose you could landrace a thin skinned tomato, but in my world, I remove all the skins from tomatoes to preserve them because of esthetics. I don’t like the bits of skin in my sauce or soup. Whether it changes the inside of the tomato or not, would depend on how long it spends in the boiling water. If you are in and out of the water quickly, the inside of the tomato will be unchanged, but the skin will not come off as easily. I like the skins to practically fall off, so by then the tomato is starting to be cooked. This is where freezing the tomatoes first would be useful, the skins would come off without heating the inside of the tomato to cooking temperatures. In comparing to grocery store tomatoes, ripe home grown tomatoes will just peel more easily without doing anything to them. When I eat grocery store tomatoes, I never peel them because, why bother. They are barely food anyway.
And back to the original question, I’m in the camp of existing at both ends of the spectrum. I definitely garden, there is no other way I know of to grow tomatoes. And tomatoes are a must. And the other favorite veggies, corn, zucchini, peppers. I have had beans reseed themselves for a couple years, and parsnips also. Then I have wild native plums in my yard, and mulberry coming up everywhere. But some things just seem to need to be found in fencerows in the country, like chokecherries. Everyone forages chokecherries. I have started leaving a brush pile in a place in my yard where I won’t mind what grows there, to see what the birds will plant. I’m sure it annoys my neighbors, though. Sigh.
3 Likes
I have removed all of the dandelion except for the petals. They tasted the same as the leaves to me. I tried removing all of the white from the petals, as well. They tasted the same as the leaves to me. I have also bought dried dandelion flowers intended for herbal teas, with only petals included, as done by professionals. They tasted exactly the same as the leaves to me. Not sweet, just bitter, in all three cases. Yuck.
If the flowers taste different from the leaves to most other people, that would explain why so many people voluntarily eat them!
1 Like
Yeah, I get it. I sometimes feel like there are things I like when I forage them, but I don’t like them enough to want to spend the limited garden space on having them more conveniently located.
I also sometimes feel like, “Wow, this is yummy enough that I want to make sure it’s available in my yard!” Even if I could easily forage (or glean) it within a reasonable walking distance of my home. 
That’s fair enough. Actually, I’m the same way with tea. It doesn’t matter what plant the leaves are from, dry them and steep them in hot water, and they all taste the same to me. Yuck.
1 Like
Huh! Is it the same way when you eat them fresh?
No, fresh greens, I can taste all the differences. I don’t know what it is about drying them for tea.
Not sure about the seeds or flavor. The whole process annoys me almost enough to invest in a vitamix.
(Laugh.) I use an immersion blender. I find it more convenient, since I can blend the stuff in the same bowl that I then stick in the microwave in order to cook it.