How to Prepare Tomatoes for Sauce (Recipe Included!)

There’s nothing like a tumbling pile of juicy red tomatoes to give you meal prep ideas—especially if you want to prep your tomatoes for delicious tomato sauce!

You can use it in pastas, stews, casseroles, chili dishes, and more. The first step is transforming them from freshly-picked veggies into a hearty and aromatic sauce.

With that said, let’s discuss how to make tomato sauce at home.

Best Types of Tomatoes for Sauce

Whether you’re buying or growing tomatoes, you should know that some types are better than others for making tomato sauce. Their differences can range from taste and texture to the way that they thicken during the cooking process.

• San Marzano: Traditionally grown in rich, volcanic soil, these tomatoes are a favorite for cooking because of their thick flesh and low water content. When you use San Marzano tomatoes for sauce, you’ll get full-bodied flavors straight out of Italy.
• Big Boy: Big Boy tomatoes are the bright, smooth, and round kind that often get sliced for sandwiches. However, you can also use them for sauces and other types of tomato reductions.
• Roma: It’s easy to prepare Roma tomatoes for sauce since they have fewer seeds than other types, making it less time-consuming to prep your raw ingredients. They’re also small, easy to handle on a cutting board, and absolutely delicious!

These are the best tomatoes to make sauce, but ultimately, the choice is yours. Feel free to experiment until you find your signature recipe. The art of preparing fresh tomatoes is one that can be just as unique as the person cooking them!

How To Prep Your Tomatoes for Making Sauce

How do you prepare tomatoes before cooking? It depends on what you’re making.

Tomato sauce does require a bit of effort, so you’ll want to block out some time for blanching, peeling, coring, seeding, and blending your tomatoes.

After that, you can preserve them raw or go ahead and fully cook them into a sauce that only needs to be reheated later.

Here’s the general process for prepping your tomatoes for sauce:

Blanching: Blanching is when you boil your tomatoes in hot water before soaking them in an ice bath. It’ll preserve flavor, improve color, lock in nutrients, and make your tomatoes easy to peel. It’s an optional step in tomato prep, but with so many benefits, most home cooks consider it worth the time.

Peeling: You don’t need tomato skins for sauce. The good news is that blanching your tomatoes will soften their skins until peeling them is as simple as grabbing the loose ends and tugging them off.

Coring: Coring your tomato is getting rid of its center, including its stem. You can chop off the sides like an apple or dig in with a knife on top.

Seeding: It’s okay to leave seeds in tomato sauce, so this is another optional step, but many people find the texture of seeds to be off-putting in what’s supposed to be a smooth, creamy blend. If you decide to seed your tomatoes, you’ll need to open them up to expose the “chambers” within, scooping out the insides with a knife or a spoon. This process is often combined with coring.

Blending: Your tomatoes will need to be blended in some way to form a paste. If you have a professional blender, that’ll do the trick. Otherwise, you can dice and mash them into a kind of puree.

If you just read through those steps and thought, “Nope, I don’t have time for this,” here are a few other ways to use up tomatoes:

• Make diced tomatoes and freeze them
• Make tomato juice in your blender
• Dehydrate them

Simple, Homemade Tomato Sauce: Step by Step

The first step to home-cooked tomato sauce is prepping your tomatoes. As outlined above, you’ll need to blanch, peel, core, seed, and blend them.

The next step is actually cooking your tomato sauce. This is where you can get creative like you’re the next contestant on Chopped!

The most common ingredients for tomato sauce are garlic, onion, oregano, and basil.

You can also add other veggies like celery, or you can sprinkle in additional flavor bombs like:

• honey
• red wine
• sea salt
• red or black pepper flakes
• bay leaves
• balsamic vinegar

Once you’ve prepared your fresh tomatoes for sauce, you’ll need to think about storage options for your leftovers.

It’ll last for 3 – 5 days in the fridge, or you can jar it, can it, or freeze it for the long term.

Canning your tomato sauce will require special equipment. If you’ve used olive oil in your skillet, you’ll also need to beware the added risk of canning things made with oils.

However, canned tomatoes will retain more of their original texture than frozen, which can be ideal for thicker, chunkier sauces.

Jarring is similar to canning, but you don’t need special equipment to do it. As long as your seal is airtight, it’ll preserve your tomato sauce just as safely, but it must be stored in the fridge (as opposed to your pantry shelf). Mason jars are a popular pick for DIY tomato sauce.

Freezing your tomato sauce is the quickest and easiest way to preserve it. All it takes is an airtight container or freezer bag, and it’ll last for up to six months before it starts to spoil.

The one downside of freezing tomatoes is that the texture can get watery after awhile, but this matters less when you’ve already reduced it to a sauce.

FAQs

Do you have to peel the tomatoes first?

Yes. Peeling, coring, seeding, and blending your tomatoes is a necessary part of making tomato sauce. Technically, you don’t have to peel them first; you can complete these steps in whatever order that you’d like. However, peeling them is a no-brainer that makes everything else easier, so why wouldn’t you?

How do you blanch tomatoes for sauce?

Blanching is a two-step cooking technique that will preserve the nutrients of your tomatoes even as they’re transformed into a sauce. It’ll also make them easier to peel! It involves boiling them for a couple of minutes before immediately plunging them into an ice bath.

How do I prepare my tomato sauce for pasta?

To prepare tomato sauce for pasta, you’ll need to reheat it. Never toss your noodles with cold sauce! Instead, bring it to a boil on the stove and allow it to simmer for a few minutes, releasing its aromatics and evenly distributing its heat.

How do I prepare my fresh tomatoes for spaghetti sauce?

To make fresh spaghetti sauce, you’ll need to peel, core, and seed some tomatoes before cooking them on the stove with your choice of meats and spices. Afterwards, if you have leftovers, you can store your tomato sauce in the freezer in an airtight container.

If you’re wondering how to prepare tomatoes for sauce, the truth is that it can be a labor of love.

It isn’t particularly difficult, but it requires multiple ingredients and a few hours in the kitchen.

If you have the time, however, it’ll be a fantastic way to use up the last of your summertime tomatoes, and it’ll let you enjoy fresh and organic garden flavors all year long!

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