Jaci Hicken, our seasoned journalist and trained chef, shares her wealth of knowledge on growing, cooking and preserving homegrown produce.

This week, we are preserving tomatoes as sauce, the sort of sauce you have on your meat pie or sausage roll.

The recipe below uses one kilogram of tomatoes and will make about one and a half 250ml bottles of sauce, but the recipe can easily be multiplied depending on how many tomatoes you have to cook.

I’ve used store-bought tomatoes, along with cherry and other tomatoes from my patch, to end up with six kilograms of tomatoes for this recipe.

There are a couple of things to look out for in this recipe.

Firstly, Cayenne pepper: don’t use your fingers to measure a pinch, as the pepper's sting can be deadly.

You can use the handle end of a metal spoon to measure something that looks like a pinch.

But you still need to keep an eye on how much you pinch, as if it is too large, the tomato sauce will become overrun with Cayenne.

Secondly, be prepared to be in the kitchen all day, as you will need to keep an eye on your pot.

This recipe took me six hours to cook, so it is very fortunate that the laptop can be in the kitchen, so writing and cooking can happen at the same time.

Thirdly, when we make this in a cooking class, sometimes guests don’t read the whole recipe and add everything at once.

If you do this, follow the recipe as it is laid out; you will just have slightly runnier tomatoes when you get to Step 2.

And fourth, crack the allspice berries in a mortar and pestle so that, as the mixture cooks, the flavour is released.

Tomato Sauce recipe

Ingredients

1kg of red tomatoes, roughly chopped

2 cloves of garlic

2 whole allspices

5g of yellow mustard seeds

2 whole cloves

A pinch of Cayenne pepper

120ml of vinegar

6g of salt

75g of sugar

Method

Step 1: Put the tomatoes, garlic, crushed allspice, mustard seeds, cloves and Cayenne in a large saucepan. Cook until everything is well pulped, about 1.5 hours.

Step 2: Run the cooked tomatoes through the mouli.

If you can do this twice, it would be great, reducing the size of the mouli’s holes for the second run through.

Step 3: Return tomatoes to the saucepan and place it back on the heat. Add the vinegar, salt and sugar, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.

Simmer for approximately 1.5 hours, until the sauce does not split.

You can check if your sauce doesn’t split by placing a spoonful on a cold saucer and if the solids and liquid separate, then it is split and needs further cooking.

For the six kilograms of tomatoes used in this batch, they were simmered for two hours but didn’t seem thick enough, so they were returned to the boil for an extra half an hour.

Step 4: Bottle and seal.

From the six kilograms of tomatoes started with, 11 250 ml bottles of tomato sauce resulted.

If you are reading this column in print, you can follow along with me cooking the tomato sauce in The Riv app and online with a few behind-the-scenes tips.

- Jaci

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Friday, 4th January 2030

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