Enough Spaghetti Sauce for the Year

Over the weekend we canned our last batch of tomato sauce of the season. My goal this year was 4 batches and wahoo, we're done!! It is a lot of work, but a few busy summer weekends pays off all year long with our luscious red gold from a jar. Rich, tomatoey, a touch of spice... there's nothing like it. I love knowing each and every ingredient that goes into this favorite quick, easy meal of ours. The smell you encounter every time you walk in the house from outside while the sauce is coooking is absolutely heavenly.

Seasoned Tomato Sauce, adapted from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving

yield: about 14 pints or 7 quarts

30 pounds tomatoes

4 cups chopped onions

8 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 cup olive oil

1 1/3 tablespoons oregano

4 bay leaves

2/3 tablespoon black pepper

1 tablespoon sugar

1/6 cup salt

1 1/3 teaspoons crushed red pepper

bottled lemon juice for canning

Canning our favorite spaghetti sauce is quite an event and takes all day... sometimes even into the next day if I take too long to get started. My recipe starts off with a 20 quart stock pot filled with washed, cored and quartered tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are the best since they tend to have the most solid/least liquid but any will work. I have made batches with any and every tomato I can find to get up to the 30 pounds, including cherry tomatoes.

I squeeze the tomatoes as I add them to the pot, bringing out the juices so that tomatoes can start to cook without burning to the bottom of the pan. I cook these until they are nice and soft.

Once the tomatoes soften, I run them all through the vegetable strainer that attaches to my KitchenAid mixer. This removes the seeds and skin, which go into the compost.

The tomato juice goes into a 16 quart stock pot with the rest of the ingredients, and then you cook, cook...

and cook it some more.

It takes many hours to cook the sauce down to a consistency I like for spaghetti sauce, and it is worth the time and effort to get it to be nice and thick. I usually cook it down by half - so basically I end up with 7-8 quarts when I start out with about 16 quarts. Add 2 T lemon juice to quarts or 1 T lemon juice to pints, and process quarts in a water bath canner for 40 minutes, pints for 35 minutes. The entire process takes 8-10 hours. Enjoy all year.