Okay, maybe a silly question, but I am looking for recipes for tomato sauce. Not pasta sauce, not spaghetti sauce, but the stuff that comes in the little 8oz cans that's basically just tomatoes and salt! We use a ton of it in different recipes and I'd love to be able to make my own, but when I try to look it up I only get recipes for pasta sauce!!
I'm sure it's not that hard, but I know the texture has to be just right (to a certain extent) for it to work in other recipes. Has anyone made their own tomato sauce/have any tried and true recipes? Please share your wisdom ๐
Edit: This stuff below, different from tomato paste, but very similar!
I never tasted tomato sauce from cans because that is not a thing where I live, but here's how I prepare homemade tomato sauce.
First you need to pick the right tomatoes:
Where I live the bottom ones are called "Roman" or "crawling" tomatoes. They're oblong. Pick those, the "salad tomatoes" on the top are not sauce material. I use 2kg (4lb) each time.
Peel them with boiling water. Discard the skins. Then open the tomatoes and chop them coarsely, reserving that "slime" full of seeds. Strain the "slime" so you get rid of the seeds (discard them); reserve a cup of the strained liquid, and blend the rest alongside the flesh. No seeds - just discard them.
Now get a large enough pot. Put the blended flesh there. Add some salt and ground pepper. (Some people like red pepper flakes here; your choice, I personally don't.) Simmer until you got 1L of sauce (~half? volume), stirring occasionally. LOW FIRE. It should take less than a hour. You want it a bit thicker than the desired final consistency.
Turn off the fire. While the sauce is still hot add that strained cup of tomato "slime" reserved in an earlier step. (That's why I told you to make the sauce thicker than the desired final consistency.)
Taste the sauce. If it's too sour, add a bit of sugar. If it lacks that "whoosh" from tomato sauce, a dash of MSG. Adjust the salt if necessary.
For reference this is the basic sauce that I use in sauce-heavy pizze, like cheese pizza. It works wonders. You can also convert into a pasta sauce with garlic, onion, basil, olive oil. It freezes really well and it should last more than a month in the freezer (I don't know the spoiling time because... well, people use it like water here.