Spaghetti Sauce

By far our favourite spaghetti sauce is my home made meat sauce but next to that is roasted tomato sauce.  The last couple of years I have been canning a plainer tomato sauce that captures some of the flavours of the meat sauce but without the meat.  Seasoned with my organically, home grown herbs it has a lovely flavour and smooth texture.  It is a versatile, mildly flavoured sauce that can be used for pasta, cabbage rolls or in any dish where you would use a tomato based pasta sauce.

A food strainer is a must when canning the amount of tomatoes I do.  It makes quick work of removing seeds and skins leaving a nice smooth puree to work with.  Foods can be strained before or after cooking.  In most cases I strain tomatoes before making them into sauces although there are a couple f tomato products I strain after cooking.

I have a manual food strainer that I set up indoors or outside depending on the weather.  Last year I splurged on the KitchenAid® food strainer attachment.  The manual food strainer is more work but it is quite portable so I can set it up where I want.  The KitchenAid® food strainer attachment is a lot less work and it gives a smoother product.  The only real complaint that I have is the hopper is too small but there is an additional tray available that extends the hopper to hold more food.  The second problem with the KitchenAid® food strainer is the set-up.  Being short I have to stand on a stool to reach the hopper but that isn't KitchenAid®'s fault that is my parents for not giving me genes for a higher stature.

I used a full hamper (5/8 bushel) to make this spaghetti sauce.  The tomatoes really would have been a bit of a pain to peel although they were a nice size for canning whole tomatoes.  Running the first hamper through the food mill was an easy start to the tomato canning season.

I canned the sauce rather late in the evening while entertaining.  Well actually my husband was entertaining and I just did the food while canning.  I had strained the tomatoes the day before so all I had to do was put the sauce together and cook it.  I do think it looks gorgeous in the jars but then I'm a bit biased.  When making this tomato sauce reserve the skins and seeds for tomato powder and let drain to can up the excess liquid to make tomato stock.