Roasted Tomato and Garlic Sauce

Our neighbors dropped off a box of their last summer harvest of juicy red tomatoes. Yes, we love these neighbors! I kept looking at the tomatoes for 2 days, pondering what I should make with them that would do justice to the impeccable quality of these beautiful organically grown fruits. I wanted to enhance their deliciousness, without losing it amidst a zillion other ingredients.  I had previously made a roasted tomato basil soup, so I thought about instead making a really delicious pasta sauce. It turned out incredibly (if I may say so myself!), even my little fussy eater has been eating her pasta with the sauce (she is usually a fan of plain boiled pasta)!

So here it is.

The first thing I did was I halved all the tomatoes lengthways and cut out the hard top stem.  I placed them neatly on two sheet trays, skin down.  I think I must have had several pounds of tomatoes (15 big sized tomatoes in all).

After laying them out, I gave them all a good seasoning of freshly ground sea salt and black pepper. I sprinkled them with torn fresh basil from my garden (probably also the last for the season), good extra virgin olive oil and finally scatter about 8-10 whole garlic cloves, still with the skin in tact

At this stage, don't worry about the skins because we will peel them off later after the roasting process.




Preheat an oven to 350F.  Place the trays in the center rack of the oven and roast for at least an hour and a half.  Keep checking. You want the tomatoes to be juicy, cooked and aromatic.  Too coked and they will dry out, not cooked enough and they won't have that roasted flavor.

Once they are done, take the trays out of the oven and let them rest for a little while so they are cool enough for you to handle.

Once you can safely handle to tomatoes, keep a pot handy and start peeling the skins of the tomatoes by hand, discarding the skins and putting the flesh in the pot. Peel off the garlic clove skins and add the roasted cloves to the pot, discarding those skins too. Add the basil to the pot as well.

Everything added to the pot

Now, peeling those tomatoes is a bit fiddly, I admit.  However, I don't really know any better method (any suggestions?? - you need the skins for the roasting process).  The only thing I can say to ease your mind is that because the tomatoes have been roasting for so long and because they are cut in half, the skins should come off fairy easily.  If you wanted to, you could very well score an "X" on the bottoms at the very beginning to encourage the skins to peel away during the cooking process.

Once everything is peeled and added to the pot, lift off any of the nice pan juices and remaining olive oil on the sheet trays with a couple tablespoons of water.  Use a plastic or wooden spoon and stir, add this water to the pot.

Put the pot on the stove and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for about 30 minutes. You want to cook the liquid out a little more and meld all those flavors nicely. At this stage, I found my first pot too small, so I had to transfer everything to a larger pot (hence, the different pots in the two photos!)

After the mixture has reduced a little, the color will change slightly and the sauce will start to look more cohesive. Here is a close-up.

Turn the stove off, move the pot to a safe place on the counter near an outlet.  Use an immersion blender to puree the mixture into a sauce, which you can run through a sieve if you choose to (I didn't because I actually like a more rustic textured sauce)

And there you have it! Check for seasoning and adjust if you like.  This is great as a sauce but quite frankly, you could just eat it in a bowl with a spoon, as a soup.  I think the sauce works best with spaghetti or a more textured pasta like rotini or spirals.  I didn't take a photo of it as a finished product because I was too quick to eat it - OOPS! You could also use this sauce for proteins like chicken or shrimp, or as a base for a hearty stew or other soup.