Best Homemade Tomato Sauce

This is an easy roasted tomato sauce recipe that is so flavourful. You can't beat homemade! One batch takes just about 1 hour to make, but if you're making alot like I did, I'm not going to lie, it will be time consuming. You have to get yourself into a rhythm, assembly line style. 

Ingredients:

2 dozen Italian plum tomatoes (about 3 lbs)
2 onions
2 large sweet peppers (red, yellow, green or orange)
6-8 cloves garlic
1-2 tbsps. olive oil
1/4-1/2 cup fresh basil
salt and pepper
1 tbsp tomato paste (optional)

Yield: about 4 cups

I cook up enough sauce to take us through until next tomato season, so I bought about 60 lbs of tomatoes, a bushel of mixed sweet peppers, 15 lbs of onions and 9 or 10 heads of garlic. And these prices were insanely good!  I also harvested 3 large bunches of basil from my garden.

Here's the assembly line. Always have a bowl with the washed veggies you need for the next recipe and another with a recipe's worth cut and ready to go. So when you take the pans out of the oven you can fill them again and start roasting!  (Note: wash the pans after every 2nd batch or the juices will start to crust and blacken too much)

Start by coring the tomatoes and cutting them in half lengthwise. Cut the onions and peppers into chunks. Arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet along with whole, peeled garlic.

Drizzle lightly with oil. I placed 2 baking sheets in the oven and rotated them (top shelf, bottom shelf) halfway through cooking time.

Roast uncovered at 400F for 45-60 minutes or until vegetables are soft and lightly browned like this...

Toss in the fresh basil, scrape any brown bits and juice from the pan and whirl in the food processor along with salt and pepper to taste.

At this point you could add a little tomato paste if you like your sauce clingy.

Process as little or as much as you like.  Depends on if you like your sauce chunky or smooth.

Ready to eat or pour into ziplock bags to freeze. You're done! (at least the first batch!)

I ended up with 15 recipes worth of sauce or about 80-90 servings! (It may be a bit more, I think I lost count) This is only one stack of sauce in the freezer that will keep us going all year with spaghetti, pizza, stuffed peppers...any recipe that calls for tomato sauce!