Turning fresh garden tomatoes into a gourmet puree

It's time to harvest your tomato sauce! Cooking up your favorite gourmet dishes with homegrown flavor all winter is easy with roasted puree made from fresh tomatoes in the Fall.

Here's the basic recipe:

--Start with a large glass, enamel or stainless steel pan and fill it with no more than 6 lbs. of tomatoes that have been rinsed with any bad spots removed.

--Drizzle on about 2 Tablespoons of olive oil (organic, extra virgin is best)

--Sprinkle with about 3 teaspoons of coarse sea salt (more or less depending on preference) and some pepper, if you wish.

--Toss tomatoes to coat them with the oil and seasoning. Your tomatoes are ready to go into the oven and they should look like this:

The longer you roast them, the thicker the puree will be but the less you will have. So keep an eye on them and definitely get them out when the tops have browned a bit, like this:

--After the tomatoes have cooled for about 15 minutes, slide them into your food mill equipped with the screen with the smallest holes. The food mill will separate the good stuff from the seeds and skins.

Tomato Soup Option You can roast tomatoes for a shorter period (45 minutes to 1 hour) along with your choice of seasonings, seperate with the food mill and you will have tomato soup.

Note on food mills I recommend using a good quality food mill. The first year I tried this, I used a cheap food mill I picked up at a grocery store. When that didn't work, I pulled out my grandmother's old hand food mill thing (the metal cone-shaped sieve with the round block of wood). After much sweat and frustration and very little extraction, I ended up with a small amount of puree from a huge pan of tomatoes. Immediately I went to the internet to look up food mills!

The Cuisipro Stainless Food Mill that I purchased is like a dream to use. It's still manual, but the handle is spring-loaded so it's no effort at all. I use it for applesauce too.

Once the puree has cooled, we first freeze the puree in plastic 16-ounce cups and then we use the Tilia Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer system (also a wonderful time saver) to package up the frozen chunk of puree.

Where else can you get tomatoes besides your garden?

If you don't grow tomatoes yourself (or know someone who does), with a little searching you should be able to find sauce tomatoes available for purchase in your area either through a local farmstand or a gourmet grocer. And, since this recipe was originally intended for any type of tomato, go ahead and try it with whatever you have. That's what got me started. It might be fun to experiment with the different varieties you can find to see what variety or blend produces the flavor you like.

I grow new varieties every season to see how they do in the garden, so our puree tends to be a blend of the tomatoes that are ripe on a given day.

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