Thread: Tomato Pastes
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Old March 28, 2012   #9
ArcherB
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Austin TX
Posts: 200
Default What works for me for sauce and paste

I've only done this a couple of times, so take with a grain of salt, but it made a pretty good paste and sauce. The paste was the consistency of tomato paste from a can, but it tasted like tomatoes.

Peel the tomatoes using the blanch method and removed the cores/tops. Compost these or use them in some other recipe if you like.

Cut tomatoes in half or however works for you to remove the seeds. Place the seeds and gel in a strainer over a large bowl. Make sure you strainer is fine enough to prevent seeds from going through it. Place the "meat" part of the tomatoes in a salad spinner. When full, spin it until it nearly vibrates off the counter. You want to get nearly all of the water from the meaty part of the tomatoes.

Pour the watery juice from the salad spinner over the seed/gel mix. I had to do this several time as the salad spinner kept filling up. I liked to dip the strainer into the watery stuff to get out every last bit of gel, leaving nothing but seeds. Pick out any pieces of tomato that somehow made it to the seed/gel bowl.

Pour watery mix into a non-stick skillet and boil at medium-high heat, stirring frequently. Place the stuff from the salad spinner in a crock pot or large sauce pot on med-low. Bury the seeds deep in your compost pile (you can probably save these if you can sterilize them and you are only using one type of tomato).

Keep boiling and stirring the watery mix in the non-stick skillet until it boils down. Add more of the watery mix as needed until it becomes a thick paste. If the tomatoes in the crock pot start to separate leaving a bunch of water on the top, you may also also add this to the skillet. This will save you a ton of time trying to boil it down in a crock pot. Keep boiling and adding more of the tomato water until you have used all the tomato water and the paste is the same consistency as the stuff you get from the can. This can take an hour or two.

You can keep the paste and sauce separate. I like to recombine them in the crock pot.

Add whatever seasonings you desire for whatever it is you are making (stew, chili, marinara). Blend if it makes you happy. Cook until you think its done.
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