Comments on: Smoked Tomato/Garlic/Basil/Eggplant Sauce

By: n[ate]vw

n[ate]vw — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:20:13 +0000

Found a link to this post on my desktop tonight that I was saving for when I’d tried it. I made a batch of spaghetti sauce with the last tomatoes of the season, and squeezed most of the seeds and juice out (saved for my wife to use in chili!) I blended only the skins, which made a nice paste I added partially to the sauce and partly to the chili. While the tomatoes had been sort of frostbitten, the result had none of that weird off flavor. So, belated thanks for your suggestions!

By: Amie

Amie — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:33:57 +0000

I’m in the middle of making a vat of pizza sauce as we speak. We don’t have a food mill, so when we do our tomatoes, we criss-cross the bottom of the skin with a knife and drop in boiling water a few seconds to peel them more easily, then cut the tomatoes in half (longways between the stem and the bottom) then squeeze all of the juice and guts out by hand. The resulting strained tomato juice makes fantastic bloody marys, btw. Anyhow–that’s a variation for those who are foodmill-less but want to give the rest of your recipe a go.

The eggplant sounds like a fantastic addition, btw. Will have to try that with a future batch!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:55:07 +0000

Forgot to mention that I add basil (fresh stuff from my grandpa’s garden, too) with the oil and salt when I’m preparing the sauce. Maybe a couple cracks of black pepper, too.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:50:56 +0000

Making pizza sauce shouldn’t be too hard on the grill, either – I roast my tomatoes (whole) directly on the grill until they feel squishy all over (usually 10 minutes or so at full-blast or close to it, depending on the grill), put them in a glass casserole dish or some non-reacting dish to hold the hot tomatoes, and let them cool to the touch.

Next, peel the skin, cut the tomatoes in half width-wise and squeeze out the seeds and juice. Put the tomatoes in a saucepan and either mash them or squeeze them with your hands until you get a near-fine consistency. Since you have a food mill, using that would probably be best (and easiest). Normally you would put the tomato meat in a saucepan with a little bit of olive oil and some salt to taste, then simmer the sauce until it reduces to a thick consistency with little liquid remaining. However, I think you could still pull this off in your BGE, albeit with a much longer time to reduce the sauce – plus you’d need to stir every so often to avoid singing the sauce, or figure a way to do slow cooking without needing to stir.

While regular tomato sauce will work fine, I’ve found the reduced nature of the pizza sauce will work best with thin crust pizzas so the sauce doesn’t make the crust soggy as it’s cooking. For deep dish, it probably won’t matter.

Also, if your BGE is large enough to fit a pizza stone, making pizzas in a grill is great – I do thin crusts in my Weber gas grill during the summer, and it’s better than doing it in my kitchen because there are no smoke alarms outside to sound off from the high temps I use to bake my pizzas!

Pardon the tangent, as I just picked up a bunch of tomatoes from my grandpa’s garden last night, and I plan to make pizza sauce this weekend. My Italian blood is singing at the thought…

By: n[ate]vw

n[ate]vw — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:49:35 +0000

Could you elaborate a bit on tomatoes getting “roasted such that the heat totally changes the flavor”? When we’ve made tomato soup and spaghetti sauce, they’ve both ended up with an unexpected “off” flavor from what we’re used to — hard to describe, but it’s almost like the sauce is too fresh or something. Could this have something to do with the cooking temperature? Or would it have more to do with things like the tomato variety, us blending the skins and seeds together, or that we don’t pump HFCS into our mix like the store bought stuff?