Slow-Roasted Tomato Sauce

Slow-Roasted Tomato Sauce is wonderful to have on hand in the dead of winter. With this in mind, I grow buckets of sauce tomatoes during the summer months and make several batches to keep in the freezer.

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(Updated post.) This weekend marked my first haul of garden tomatoes.

Thus begins one of my favorite weekend cooking projects: slow-roasted tomato sauce.

If you're looking for a garden-fresh marinara recipe for all of your gorgeous garden or farmers' market tomatoes, you can't go wrong with this.

Homegrown harvest

Let’s back up slightly. Phil and I planted our first garden a while back.

To say that we didn’t know what we were doing is an understatement—but I was happy with the results overall.

One of the things we did wrong in the beginning was the watering method: we used a sprinkler rather than watering at the roots.

Apparently, tomato plants don’t appreciate that. As a result, our tomato harvest was sub-optimal.

But the one tomato plant that DID do well was my “San Marzano” plant, which yielded fantastic sauce tomatoes.

Will we ever figure this tomato thing out?

The next year, our tomato plants suffered from blossom end rot. I pulled off tomato after tomato with disgusting, black ends and thought that the tomato harvest would be a bust.

But some Googling revealed calcium deficiency as the culprit, which could easily be fixed with calcium-containing sprays.

The tomato plants bounced back and I had several batches of garden tomato sauce as a result.

THIS year, although our tomato plants are decorated with gorgeous, ripe and almost-ripe tomatoes, that's all that's left of the plant. The hubster despairs that we'll ever figure this out. I tend to agree.

Slow-Roasted Tomato Sauce: roasting the tomatoes

Sauce-making is a great weekend cooking project—especially this one, since it involves very little hands-on time.

If you have the time for a slow-roast, this marinara is one of the easiest sauces you can make.

If you don’t have access to fresh tomatoes, you can also make the sauce with good-quality, whole, peeled tomatoes.

If you feel like splurging, spring for the actual San Marzano tomatoes, marked “D.O.P.”, for “d' Origine Protetta” (protected designation of origin).

However, I rarely do this anymore: $6 a pop for a can of tomatoes is a bit hard to swallow.

I like to slice my tomatoes and lay them out on sheet-pans, add salt and pepper, top with fresh herbs (I recommend parsley, rosemary, thyme, and/or oregano; you can also use dried herbage), and drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil.

I scatter sliced shallots, onions, or garlic over the tomatoes.

I leave the garlic in its skin, which protects it from getting that acrid, burned flavor, then squeeze the cloves out later.  

I roast the tomatoes in a 250° oven for as long as I can stand it (usually about 2 hours, stirring once during the roast).

Assembling your slow-roasted tomato sauce

When the sheet-pans come out of the oven, I pick the herbs out and throw them away.

The onions, shallots, or garlic get peeled, minced and sautéed—SLOWLY—in olive oil with some pepper flakes (preferably the EVOO that was used in the roast! Just strain it right into the pan to catch the seeds).

I sometimes add some finely grated carrot toward the end of the sauté for added sweetness: this substitutes nicely for adding sugar.

While the aromatics sauté, I run the tomatoes through a food mill, which catches most of the skin and seeds. You can also puree the tomatoes in a food processor, or zap them with an immersion blender.

Building extra flavor into slow-roasted tomato sauce

AND NOW, A HACK. And for any "Italian Foodistas" out there, this is ABSOLUTELY not authentic. (But it's delicious.)

You know how adding anchovies to just about any sauce adds incredible richness, but without the fishy flavor? (It does.)

I love this idea, but I hate leftover anchovies and those little vile-smelling tins.

As an alternative strategy, I first went to using a teaspoon or so of anchovy paste, added toward the end of the garlic/onion/shallot sauté. This works great, but…

I recently discovered that you can cheat by using Asian Fish Sauce. Yeah, I mix my cuisines.

This is a super-easy way to umami-fy your sauce. After all, the main ingredient is anchovy extract. 

I got very excited when I made this discovery and Googled it to see if anyone else had thought of it. They had. I'm definitely not the first.

You know the part where you would usually add some wine to the pan and reduce?

I now FIRST add about 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and reduce it to almost nothing. THEN I add the wine.

You might wrinkle your nose or raise an eyebrow, but to me, the smell of the sautéed garlic and that reduction is AMAZING. The result is a rich, complex flavor that you would never associate with fish.

Slow-roasted Tomato Sauce: the chunk dilemma

Now it’s time to add the tomatoes.

The last time I made the sauce, I left the tomatoes chunky, just giving them a rough chop. However, this turned out to be kid-unfriendly, as I discovered when the boys industriously picked out EVERY SINGLE chunk of tomato.

So if you have kids or you’re chunk-averse, I’d suggest running the tomatoes through a food mill or giving them a quick purée with an immersion blender.

Simmer low and slow until the sauce thickens, watching carefully to keep it from spitting all over your kitchen.

What to do with your slow-roasted tomato sauce

When you have achieved your desired consistency, you’ve reached a fork in the road.

You could now eat your tomato sauce sauce over pasta: just add some Parmesan or Romano cheese, maybe sprinkle with some fresh basil, and you’re good to go.

You could portion out your sauce into freezer bags/containers for an easy weeknight meal.

You could make Bolognese sauce. You could do a combination of all of these.

The great thing about freezing some or all of your sauce is that it’s an easy weeknight meal for busy times.

You can simply heat up the sauce.

Or, for a simple meat sauce, sauté some Italian sausage and diced onions and add it in . Put it over some pasta, and BOOM—dinner done.

Or use it in a baked pasta casserole. You can put these together the night before so that all you have to do is pop them into the oven!

What I’ve described above is a basic canvas for a sauce that you can embellish to your heart’s content. Enjoy!

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 Related

"Bolognese" Sauce: my cheater version of the Italian classic. Easy enough for a weeknight!

Baked Lasagna Bowls: great make-ahead meals for busy times. I always make a few of these when I have extra bolognese or marinara sauce hanging about.

The Bolognese-Lasagna One-Two Punch: an easy "saucy two-step" meal plan with Bolognese Sauce, where you make the sauce ahead and then use it over pasta and in Lasagna Bolognese.