I used to hate spaghetti night when I was a kid.  My parents made the sauce from scratch, and the result was both watery and chunky --- pretty much par for the course with homemade tomato sauces.  When I was finally introduced to storebought spaghetti sauce, I fell in love.  Three years of trial and error later, I finally figured out how to make a full-bodied tomato sauce with homegrown tomatoes that tastes even better than the stuff in the jar and is just as good for you as the kind my parents made.

Start with roma tomatoes.  There are two main types of tomatoes when it comes to cooking --- romas and everything else.  Roma tomatoes have less water and more flesh than any other kind of tomato, and they also tend to have few enough seeds that I make my sauces with skins and seeds in.  It's okay to include some extra slicers and tommy-toes as long as the romas overpower their wateriness and seediness.

Get out your biggest skillet.  The trick to making a spaghetti sauce that turns out creamy and not watery is to let the pectin in the tomatoes do its magic --- you're basically making tomato jam.  To that end, you're in a race against the naturally occurring enzymes that start to break down the pectin in your tomato as soon as the flesh is cut.  The enzymes are activated by air and then denatured (made inactive) by heat, so you need to keep your tomatoes intact until the last minute, then heat the whole mass of tomatoes up as fast as possible.  Thus the skillet --- more surface area on the burner means your sauce comes to a boil faster.  Plus, there's more surface area through which excess water can cook off.

Prepare your tomatoes.  Romas don't have any core to speak of, so after a quick rinse, you can just lop off the very top where the stem was attached.  Quickly chop each roma into three pieces and toss them in the skillet.  (Note: I'm of the "skins and seeds are good for you and taste fine" school of thought.  If you disagree, you'll want to remove both at this stage.)  Once you've cut all of the tomatoes into large chunks, take big handfuls and squeeze them until there's enough liquid in the pan that the tomatoes won't stick to the bottom and burn.

Add other ingredients.  Put your skillet of tomatoes on the stove on medium-high heat (stirring the contents occasionally so nothing sticks) and add anything else you like in your spaghetti sauce.  One of my large skillets holds about a gallon of tomatoes, and to this I generally add 1 onion (sliced), 3 cloves of garlic (pressed), 3 or 4 dried bay leaves, and some salt and pepper.  At the very end, I'll also add a lot of fresh basil leaves and will vainly try to fish the used bay leaves out.  If I'm going to add hamburger meat, I usually cook it up separately and add the meat at the end.  Squash, peppers, or other vegetables can go in about thirty minutes before the sauce is done.

Cook the sauce until it thickens.  Delicious spaghetti sauce has to be cooked long enough for the pectin to do its work.  I start the pan on medium-high until the contents are boiling hard, then turn the heat down a bit at a time over the next hour or two until the setting is on medium-low.  During that time, the tomatoes will cook down to about half their original volume.  For quite a while, you'll be stirring a pan of tomatoes and onions, but then, all of a sudden, you can barely see individual components and the sauce tastes and looks like sauce.  Success!

Don't worry if you scorch the bottom.  I tend to forget to stir nearly every batch at a critical stage and a bit of sauce sticks to the bottom and burns.  Whatever you do, don't scrape that burnt bit back into the sauce and don't ignore it and keep simmering.  Instead, quickly pour off all of the good sauce into a new skillet and set the scorched pan in the sink, filled with water, to soak.  As long as you don't stir the burnt sauce in or let the good sauce sit on top of it long, you won't be able to taste the error at all.  (Maybe if you could, I'd be better about stirring and wouldn't always let my spaghetti sauce burn?)

Lasagna is better for you than spaghetti.  By now, I'm sure some of you are wondering why I go to so much trouble to make spaghetti sauce when we've deleted spaghetti from our diet and cut grains down to a bare minimum.  The same sauce can be used to make a high protein and high vegetable lasagna that keeps my body healthy and my spaghetti-loving tastebuds happy.  To assemble a 9X13" pan of lasagna, I use about a skillet and a half of spaghetti sauce, half this potsticker dough recipe for the noodles (which can be layered in uncooked), 1.5 pounds of hamburger meat (cooked), quite a bit of cheddar, mozarella, and parmesan cheeses, and any subset of cooked leafy greens, sliced summer squash, and sliced mushrooms.  Starting from tomatoes on the vine, it takes perhaps three hours to make up a big pan of lasagna, but then we have quick leftovers to heat up for lunch nearly all week!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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