277: Oven-Roasted Pasta Sauce

Before our first frost advisory, I picked all the green tomatoes on my tomato plant. I had 7 pounds of green tomatoes! I've been waiting for the majority of them to be ripe at the same time so that I could make Oven-Roasted Pasta Sauce.

Even so, I didn't have 5 pounds of ripe tomatoes, so I made a ¾ batch of this instead. That translated to 3.75 pounds of tomatoes, or 60 ounces. I sliced one large onion into wedges and halved the (small) tomatoes. I put them on a baking sheet, drizzled them with olive oil, and liberally applied salt and pepper. About 5 or 10 minutes before I took them out of the oven, I put some amount of minced garlic on the tomatoes to roast a little, since I didn't have whole cloves of garlic to roast from the start. I baked them for 2 hours, until I thought they looked pretty roasted [see picture on original recipe to see what they should look like]. I wanted to taste the roasted tomatoey goodness, so I added a couple of tablespoons of water rather than wine, and scraped away at the browned bits on the bottom of the baking sheet.

At this point it was late Sunday evening, so I put all of the tomato mixture into a container and put it in the fridge. The next day I reheated it, added some parsley, and pureed it in the blender. By heating it and then blending it, I was able to pour it directly on pasta.

This was fine. I actually didn't enjoy this as much as I had thought I would. I love roasted tomatoes, but I think that when it comes to pasta sauce, I prefer what I make without a recipe [which usually involves ground beef, several herbs, and a little red wine]. This was kind of sweet from the natural sugar in the tomatoes, since the tomatoes from my tomato plant always seemed relatively sweet. I may have enjoyed it more if I hadn't roasted it as long, as well, or if I'd added wine to it rather than water. I think I'd enjoy basil or oregano (or maybe even some other herbs) in it more the fresh parsley I put in it.

There was nothing wrong with this, and a lot of potential good. I think that I would have enjoyed the roasted taste more over chicken, or with something else that wasn't simply plain pasta. It was fun to make, and much less complicated than cooking on the stove. I might try it in the future, varying the roasting time as well as the herbs and spices, if I have lots of tomatoes and want a hands-off recipe.