Calling all chefs! I'm trying to use fresh tomatoes, actually I'm living in Bolivia and can only get fresh tomatoes,no paste or concentrate! How can I thicken a good tomato sauce without paste? When I cook fresh tomatoes my sauce is way too watery. Any recipe Ideas? ccsarage@yahoo.com

[Mangilao30]

You have the best luck to have only fresh toms. Are you making sauce? If you are, first peel the toms and then if you can cut them in half and get rid of the seeds and pulp then cook, just like canned toms. Let the sauce simmer and it will thicken naturally, do you need recipies? What types?

[KeeperOfTheGood]

Hey oh

As well as the time to let the sauce simmer and naturally thicken, and the deseading of the tomatoes, there is also the variety to concider. Roma's will make a nice sauce soon enough, beefsteaks will eventually dissapear (they are far more water than roma's).

Also, (anyone who has--some help here), if you have an abundance of fresh tomatoes, why not concider making sundried tomatoes. Then a lot of the cooking needed to remove the water is done. (not to mention having them in the off season)

Hmmm, another thought is what Chef used to say, "people are so used to sauce from a jar or can they have forgotten what a home made sauce really is."

[deltadoc]

Every year for the last 30 years, the wife and I have taken fresh Roma tomatoes from our garden and the Farmer's market and blanching them in boiling water for 3 minutes, then running them through a cheap food mill that separates the skin and seeds from the pulp which comes out of a little side chute. We then canned the resulting puree, and opened a jar to reduce in a pan on the stove to make tomato sauces for pasta or pizza.

I used to think it didn't get much better than this. However, recently I read the following chapter on Pizza Sauces:

http://www.correllconcepts.com/Encyc...e/08_sauce.htm

and it changed my mind about reducing fresh tomato puree to form a thicker sauce.

Therefore I do use paste to augment our puree made from fresh tomatoes.

Since you do not have paste available you have three options as far as I can see:

1. Take the advice given above and use sundried tomatoes which you can re-constitute to the desired thickness.

2. Order tomato paste over the internet.

3. Reduce the sauce on the stove as we did for 30 years, knowing that the sauce will not retain the flavor of commercially prepared pastes/thickened purees that are reduced using vacuum techniques that keep the temperature much lower than open boiling at atmospheric pressure.

doc