Quick Tomato Sauce: How to Make Tomato Sauce with Fresh Tomatoes

How to Make Tomato Sauce: Fastest Way to Make Tomato Sauce

Tomato sauce can seem daunting. Peeling tomatoes. Handling hot tomatoes. Getting out the seeds. It just seems like a huge process. 
Making tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes doesn’t have to be hard. In this post, I will tell you how to make quick tomato sauce and how to make tomato sauce at home that you’ll love. 
Quick Tomato Sauce

Quick Tomato Sauce: 5 Easy Steps

1. Gather Tomatoes
When planning to make quick tomato sauce, I try to pick as many tomatoes as I can from the garden to make the job worth it. I tend to take on large preservation projects, and tomato sauce is no exception. When I bring them in from the garden, I wash them and remove any stems. 
 

2. Add to Roaster

Once they’re washed, I throw them all in our my roaster. If I want to add anything extra, like peppers, garlic, onions, basil – I’ll do that now. I literally cut the onions in half WITH the papers, and throw those in. I don’t deseed my peppers. I don’t take off the garlic papers. I don’t remove basil stems. This will all get pulverized in the Vitamix, and it saves SO MUCH TIME. 

3. Cook to Soften 

Let everything cook in the roaster for at least 4 hours on 200 or so. I’ve let myself stuff cook for up to 48 hours, and honestly, it’s fine. That’s the beauty of this method. You can get sidetracked by 100 things over a few days, and it’s all good. As long as your roaster is still on low heat (around 200), everything will be fine. 

4. Blender Time

Once everything is soft, pour in batches into the Vitamix. People also use an immersion blender, but I absolutely prefer the Vitamix for this step. Blend everything up into beautiful sauce. At this point, you can pour the sauce into a large stock pot because you’re going to start canning it soon. It’s already going to be hot, so you can just put your large stock pot on low on the stove while you get your jars and such ready. 

5. Water Bath Can 

Water bath can your sauce. Tomato sauce needs water bath canned for 40 minutes for quarts and 35 minutes for pints. You’ll want to make sure the acidity is high enough, so add 2 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice to each quart jar (or 1 tablespoon to each pint) before filling with the sauce. Follow all the usual safe canning procedures, like hot jars, hot sauce, hot water in the canner, and make sure everything is as clean as possible. 

Quick Tomato Sauce

Quick Tomato Sauce Recipes

If you know me in real life, you know that no one in this family follows recipes. SO for this step…we don’t add any seasonings to our sauce. We just can plain tomato sauce, and then we’ll season it as we pull it off the shelf. This makes it so much easier to adapt to any meal. 
When it comes off the shelf for a meal, we might add basil, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper, or a whole host of other seasonings depending on what we’re making. We really prefer to have simple one or a few ingredient jars of food on the shelf because it makes it so much more versatile. 
Seasoning and salt do not affect the safety of canning, so this is not something that I worry about when it comes to safe canning practices. 
Easy Tomato Sauce

Quick Tomato Sauce Saves Time

This method to cooking and processing tomatoes for canning has seriously changed the way I think about tomatoes. I used to DREAD processing tomatoes. The way I did it before took so much time, we were handling hot tomatoes trying to peel them, and we never got the yield we felt like we should. We wasted so much time and product. This way allows you to use literally the ENTIRE TOMATO, the ENTIRE ONION, the ENTIRE PEPPER, the ENTIRE GARLIC – you just have no waste with this method. 
Once you’re tomato sauce is finished canning, you can remove the rings, label, and you’ll have beautiful tomato sauce to use all year long on pasta, in chili, in meat sauce, or whatever else you need it for! 
Quick Tomato Sauce

More Resources

To get more how-to’s and to learn about homesteading and homeschooling, check out our Homesteading Resources tab on our website. You can also check out our YouTube video on the Fastest Way to Make Tomato Sauce with tips included on how to make your tomato sauce give you tomato juice, as well as converting your tomato sauce into ketchup or BBQ sauce. 

 

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