Making da sauce… Canning homemade marinara sauce

Another “experiment” I wanted to try as part of my reduce our waste 52 week challenge was canning tomatoes.  As someone of Italian descent, “making da sauce” was something that was part of my heritage.  My mother used to make tomato sauce using tomatoes from our garden.   Since I had not canned tomatoes before (and was not sure that this was something I would redo), I did as I preach and borrowed the canning equipment from my sustainable sister:

This year, I only grew cherry tomatoes which we easily ate so I did not have any extra tomatoes available for making sauce.  Consequently, I went to the farmers market to buy a box:

50 lbs (25 kg) of tomatoes.  It didn’t seem that much until I came home.  I could barely lift the box out of the car.  I started washing the tomatoes….

and washing them….OMG there were a lot of tomatoes.  Everywhere I looked in the kitchen, there were tomatoes:

Even Buddha was tired of seeing them.  I blanched the tomatoes in boiling water to remove the skins:

Then I cut the tomatoes in 4 to peel off the skins, removed the seeds and then chopped them.  I was also able to collect the juice from the tomatoes to reuse for later:

This juice will be used in my minestrone soup later in the week.  I was pleased with my ingenuity in saving all the ingredients from the tomatoes.  After 8 hours of chopping on Day 1, it was midnight and I was exhausted.  The sauce would have to start tomorrow.  Up early on Saturday, it was time to cook the tomatoes that I had lovingly prepared.  I used the recipe for marinara sauce from the daring gourmet (Daring Gourmet Marinara Sauce):

The sauce took 2 hours to cook and then I pureed it using a stick immersion blender.  My daughter and I tried it:

If I do say so myself, OMG it was delicious.  My daughters concurred.  Buoyed by my daughters enthusiasm, I soldiered on.  It was time to sterilize the jars and add the sauce:

and then proceed to the final canning step: sterilizing for 45 minutes.

By 7 PM that day, the sauce was ready.

And then I understood why Anthony Bourdain said that nothing was better than plain pasta with marinara sauce:

That being said,  I really don’t want to see any tomatoes for a while….

Challenge for the Week:  Have you ever tried to can tomatoes?  How did it go?  If not, I encourage you to give it a try!  Remember to plan for lots of time to get the work done.  The taste of the finished product is well worth it.