How to Can Basic Pasta Sauce

by Abigail Hayes Posted on August 28, 2012

The tomato plants have mostly survived despite drought, bugs, and two crazy hail storms that blew every single plant down.  However, they don’t look pretty and no matter what angle I tried, I couldn’t get a post-worthy picture.  They just look like a tangled mess of weary tomato plants, some of their cages have toppled over, many have brown and/or bug eaten leaves, but somehow they keep churning out the tomatoes.  We have 16 plants (well 15, one died after being uprooted by the storm) and try to make sauce whenever there’s at least 20-30 ripe tomatoes.  We have always planted a variety of tomatoes just for the sake of diversity, but are starting to understand the appeal of sauce tomatoes like Romas, since their water and seed content is so much lower than big juicy varieties like Brandywine and Beefsteak.  As far as flavor goes, I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad variety for tomato sauce, but less water and fewer seeds add up to less work.  Keep in mind that, if saving seeds for next year, it’s best to only plant one open-pollinated (heirloom) variety to ensure the viability and quality of the seeds.  We haven’t tackled tomato seeds yet, but I might try to talk my husband into planting a bunch of one variety next year so we can expand our gardening skills.

Roma tomatoes are great for sauce.

This year we’ll turn most of our tomatoes into pasta sauce.  We tend to make a pasta dish for dinner once a week year round, so making our own sauce can really add up to savings at the grocery store.  I also really like knowing exactly what’s in the sauce and where it came from, all organic ingredients from our nitty gritty garden.  Plus, the flavor of store-bought sauce just can’t compete with homemade.
We used to use about half of our tomatoes to make salsa, but noticed we got burned out by mid-December and would end up giving a lot of it away.  That’s why most of the tomatoes are designated for sauce this year.  I’m sure we’ll chop up some fresh salsa here and there, but probably won’t end up canning any.  This is an important consideration when planning your garden.  What do you really enjoy eating?  Gardening and canning are both pretty big time investments, so you want to be sure to plant the things you really want to eat to get the best return on your investment.

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