Tomato Sauce

[PeterNZ]

4.5 kg Tomatoes
1.5 kg Apples
1 kg Onions
500 g sugar
2 - 4 tablespoons salt to taste
1 litre vinegar
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon blade mace
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

Chop up the tomatoes, apples and peeled onions and put in a pan. Bring to the boil, stirring, and cook until soft, then rub the pulp through a sieve. Discard tomatoe skins etc. and return pulp to the pan with spices tied in muslin and the remaining ingredients. Stir well to dissolve the sugar and cook and stir until the sauce is thick enough. Bottle in preserving jars while hot and seal.

From: "A New Zealand Country Harvest Cookbook" by Gilian Painter, Penguin Books (NZ) ISBN 0 670 87837 5

One tip: to get the peels off tomatos, use a coarse grater, cut tomatos in half and grate them down to the skin. This is how we do it for sauces and everything. It was shown to my wife by the mother of one of our Turkish friends!

Do not use juicy apples for this recipe or you will get too much apple juice in your tomato sauce. We used NZ Braeburn with success.

Enjoy!

Cheers

Peter

[shiney]

Thanks Peter!

[wulf]

Interesting looking recipe - I wouldn't have thought of using apples.

My general approach is a little bit simpler - a base of fried onions (perhaps a bit of garlic as well), seasoned with freshly ground salt and pepper, then adding the tomatoes (often out of a tin - if not, washed but probably not peeled... I don't mind it a bit chunky!). The magic ingredient to give the sauce some zing is to heat some wine vinegar with a bit of sugar, until the sugar is dissolved, and then add that to the sauce.

I'll have to check out the results of your approach though - just guessing from the ingredients and method, I would anticipate something smooth and tasty.

Wulf