Tomato sauce

Tomatoes. Is there anything better? There's a nice man at the market from whom I can buy a case of tomatoes at a time. This month he had romas by the case, around 10kg, for $12. Can't sneeze at that, when they were going for around $3 or $4 a kilo everywhere else. The catch is that they are uber ripe, and some are already over the line - I got 9.5kg of useable tomatoes out of this weeks's box. That's still an excellent price. But it means you pretty much have to use them straight away. Since we're still swimming in tomato relish from the last time I couldn't walk past the nice tomato man without buying a case, I thought I'd have a go at a tomato ketchup.

As luck would have it, I'd been watching one of Jamie Oliver's shows during the week, in which he made a fabulous looking ketchup. I'd recorded it because I had a feeling I might want another look at it at some point. Copied out the recipe best I could, and had a go...

The first step was to make some passata - essentially, tomato puree with some onion and spices in. I cheated a little and bought two bottles of passata at the supermarket to get things started. I put the bottled sauce, and around 4kg of tomatoes into a saucepan, over a medium heat, and cooked for around an hour, until the tomatoes had broken down. I then added onion and spices, and since I would have to blend the ketchup later, elected not to blend the passata now, purely for labour saving reasons.

While the passata was cooking, I chopped the other 5kg of tomatoes. Not a pleasant exercise when the hands are showing the signs of the kitten teething - tomatoes being acidic and all, the juice doesn't half sting in little scratches.

I then chopped around 4kg of onions. Actually, that's a total lie. I put 4kg of onion into the food processor, and whizzed them. I hate chopping onions more than almost everything else, ever.

I sweated the onions in a little bit of olive oil, for about 10 minutes rather than the 15 suggested. If I had've left them any longer they would've burnt.

Meanwhile in the mortar and pestle I whacked some fennel seeds, coriander seeds and powder and cloves and gave them a bit of a stir. These were added to the onion for the last couple of minutes of cooking.

The onion and spice mixture was then added to the passata which by now was finished. This was followed by the chopped tomatoes, a bit of salt and pepper, ginger, chilli, basil (just the stalks, the leaves came later), some red wine vinegar and brown sugar.

It was round about this time that it became obvious I'd made an ocean of ketchup - that's my 15 litre stockpot in that photo, full almost to the top. Oh well.

I then brought it to the boil, no mean feat taking into account the volume, then reduced the heat to medium and cooked the ketchup for about half an hour, adding the basil leaves right at the end so that they don't just wither and disappear.

And then, the real fun began. Jamie makes it sound really easy on the show - whack in blender, push through sieve, bottle. The reality is an awful lot of buggering around, and ketchup absolutely EVERYWHERE. That was even without having a blender lid accident. Also, blending 15 litres of ketchup 500ml at a time to prevent afore mentioned lid accidents is nothing short of tedious.

Luckily Michael was on hand to take photos. Or something. Once the ketchup had been blended, I used a collander to sieve out the skins and the bulk of the seeds, since my sieves are too fine, and were just letting tomato flavoured water through.

Fortunately, not only have I been hoarding empty jars, but so has my mum, so I did manage to have enough jars on hand, although that did include two huge V8 juice bottles! You can see some of the tomato-flavoured devastation here, all over my stove.

A very, very messy production, but so worth it. Despite having produces gallons of the stuff, I can't see it lasting long. You can use it in place of tomato ketchup, but also as a base for pasta sauce, or probably on its own in pasta. Next time, however, may make smaller quantities at a time!!