Roasted Tomato Sauce

This sounds wonderful - very authentic Italian flavor. All you have to do is open a bottle of this and add it to pasta. Voila! Another use to preserve your tomato harvest.

Roasted Tomato Sauce

4 pounds tomatoes, stemmed and quartered
1 large onion (or 2-3 small), roughly chopped.
2 Jalepeno peppers (remove seeds for less heat)
16 cloves fresh garlic
1/4 Cup Extra Virgin Olive oil
1 Tbsp. dry oregano (or a bunch of fresh oregano & basil)
Combine ingredients in a 9x13 inch pan.
Roast at 450°F for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until juices get thick.
Tomatoes will get a bit blackened and will smell wonderful.
Let cool, and run through a food mill to remove skins & seeds.
The resulting puree will be nice & thick; no need to reduce.
Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Add a little sugar to taste (start with ½ teaspoon per quart) to help mellow the flavor of the sauce.

You may freeze in bags or containers or pressure can the sauce in pint jars.

Cooking with Roasted Tomato Sauce
The intense flavor of this sauce means that a little sauce will go a long way. A cup of roasted sauce is generally enough to sauce about a pound of pasta. I like to use pasta shapes like gemmeli (twists) or farfalle (bowties) that will hold just a little sauce. Shapes like rotini (spirals) or conchiglie (shells) might give you more sauce in a bite than you'd like. For a more decadent dish, add cream until the sauce is richly pink. A little freshly grated parmesan cheese finishes the dish perfectly.

Roasted Tomato Sauce in Quantity
Put heaps of cut tomatoes into a big roasting pan, drizzle on a good cup of olive oil, and start roasting. As they cook down, add a few more quarts of cut up tomatoes and drizzle on more olive oil. Along the way, add several quarts each of chopped peppers and onions, 5 or 6 heads' worth of garlic cloves, and a handful of hot peppers. Toward the end, throw in several handfuls of fresh basil leaves. This quantity takes 5-6 hours to cook down at 450'F. Give it a stir about every half hour so more tomatoes get a chance to blacken. From a batch that starts with 40 or 50 pounds of tomatoes, there will generally end up about a gallon of thick, rich sauce. If you'd like to thicken the sauce a bit more, you can add some canned tomato paste without affecting the flavor.

Marinara Sauce
For a lovely marinara sauce, try adding some robust red Italian wine and extra basil, oregano, and thyme. For every quarter cup (4 tablespoons) of fresh minced basil that I add to my big batch of sauce, I generally add 2 tablespoons of greek oregano and 1 tablespoon of thyme. If you're using dried herbs, add them by the teaspoon rather than by the tablespoon. For a zesty pizza sauce, add extra peppers and garlic to the tomatoes while they're roasting, and add extra oregano when you're finishing the sauce.