Tomato Sauce

Tomatoes are overflowing this year ... red plum, oxheart, beef, cherry, black Russians, yellow, orange and striped tomatoes.

First I’ll select medium sized and start some slow roasting on medium heat, when they’re cooked and while the oven is slowly cooling down put in a batch of halved salted tomatoes for oven drying. If you have a good spot and the patience for three days of sun drying the flavour is superb. I peel some of the larger tomatoes for bottling in the Vacola.

The most pleasurable task with the greatest rewards is sauce making. My fresh tomato sauce method is quite basic, starting with frying onion, carrot, celery and garlic in olive oil, add chopped tomatoes, cook for a couple of hours to reduce, then add salt, sugar and vinegar to balance the flavours. A few fresh basil and parley leaves finish it off.

I’m on a quest for the best sauce in town. I gather relish, chutney and sauce recipes and experiment each year with Australian style tomato sauce for spreading on steak, Italian style for pouring on piping hot pasta, and herby chunky relish for topping toast.

My obsession with collecting sauce recipes comes from living in the Vale of the Makers of Sauce. We have abundant Italian heritage mixed in with the varied European descendants in McLaren Vale, luckily the local families keep the tradition of growing and bottling their tomatoes each year. It is fascinating to hear the different methods, and while everyone has an opinion on why their sauce is the best it is extremely difficult to pry the closely guarded recipes from them.

Do you have a Sauce recipe to share?

Jock Harvey of Chalk Hill Wines makes one of the most talked about and copied sauces around. Jock’s sauce has been sold at the local Farmers Market, and on first taste this got my vote for packing a punch.

Jock swears by Wild’s ‘Ezy Sauce’ as a ‘bullet proof’ method for beginners’ home sauce making. I hadn’t heard of Ezy Sauce before this, but it was easy to find at our local supermarket – it is a mix of acid, pepper, clove oil and chilli in a brown ‘stubby’ bottle. Jock prefers using this mix for the lasting properties, he says it ages well in the bottle, developing depth and length of flavour. You can imagine Jock decanting small batches of sauce just to check whether this is good to put down or ‘drink now’.

Jock Harvey’s Super Spicy Sauce Recipe

1 x kilo chopped onions
10 x kilos tomatoes quartered (Romas - vine ripened, fresh from the garden are best)
1 x kilo chopped apples
170g x crushed garlic (fresh or jar)* or 100g fresh chopped
1 portion of Vindaloo Curry Paste* (no I can’t get the recipe for this but you can buy ready made and add to your heat’s desire)
2 x 25g packets dried chilli
1.5 kilo Sugar
½ Cup Salt
1 x 375ml bottle Ezy Sauce*

*available at most supermarkets

Jock's method is to cook warm olive oil in a large heavy based pan, add the chopped onions and cook until translucent, then tip in the rest of your ingredients and bring to the boil, lower heat and cook gently for 3 hours, then blitz it with a Bamix.

From Sumptuous Article Autumn Edition