How to make a basic Tomato sauce

The Staff Canteen

For this video I'm going to show you really simple Tomato sauce, obviously it’s something that there are lots of different ways of making, but we’re going to take just some really simple ingredients, so we’ve got some garlic which I'm just going to finely cut-up so just fairly finely sliced and then I've got some diced onions, olive oil, thyme and some nice cherry tomatoes, got a lot of olive oil we've got about 75 mills of olive oil there, the flavour of the olive oil with the tomatoes is a fairly key part of the source, so we're just going to let the olive oil warm and then we can add or onions stir, scrape the pot out of those, little bit of garlic and we're just going to sweep the onions and garlic down, I'm going a little pinch of salt because the salt will help to draw the moisture out to the onions and stop them browning too quickly and while that's sweating down I’m just going to add some sprigs of thyme, just a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme and then over a fairly low heat it'll take three or four minutes for those onions just to cook out.

So our onions are nearly cooked there just starting to go translucent, starting to soften so I'm going to add my tomatoes and we’re literally going to strip these off the vine and put them in whole and what you want to do now is just cook this out until the tomatoes start to burst they’ll start to release all their juices, so our tomatoes have cooked out now you can see they’ve burst, all the juices have come out and everything has quite nicely emulsified in the pan, so we’re going to take these off the heat now and we are not going to put these into a food processor now were just going to rub them through a sieve so I’m going to do perhaps half at a time and just with a ladle we’re just going to rub those through a sieve and this will give you quite a thin Tomato sauce, the olive oil will have thickened it slightly, to finish it depending on it’s use you could thicken with some ultratex or some cornflour just to give the sauce a bit more body, I think we've got everything that we're going to get out of there and that's a very simple Tomato sauce.

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The Staff Canteen

The Staff Canteen

Editor 9th February 2017

How to make a basic Tomato sauce