Week 8: Possible Fail! Tomato Sauce

My plan was to make a pizza from scratch using homemade sauce, homemade crust, and quality ingredients.  That is unlikely to get completed in a timely fashion, as I'll explain in a bit, but I'm holding the fallback position of homemade tomato sauce for week 8, although that's not going well, either.

My research uncovered a plethora of homemade pizza sauces, each slightly different from the others.  Some use fresh tomatoes, others prefer canned, or for the really simple ones, tomato sauce.

Being an ambitious type, I searched for ones with fresh tomatoes.  I like to do things right!  I found one that I liked, except that it didn't contain all the spices I wanted, so I decided to add them!  Here is the one I ended up with:

10 roma tomatoes
1 large onion
2 T Olive oil
2 T butter
2 small carrots
5 cloves garlic
1/4 c fresh basil
1/8 c fresh oregano
1/4 tsp italian seasoning
1/4 tsp celery salt
1/4 cup red wine
2 T tomato paste

I chose romas because they generally have a good flavor and are more likely to be fresher than others in the middle of winter.  At least that was my theory.  I picked up 5 or so at the Pike Place Market, figuring those would be the freshest, but had to get 5 more at the grocery store to round out the recipe when I decided not to halve it as I'd originally planned.

I blanched the tomatoes to get the skins off and then squeezed out all the seeds.  I then pureed 8 of them and chopped the other two up roughly.  This was per the instructions on the recipe I was following.  In hindsight, since my final goal was pizza sauce, I should have just pureed them all, but it's not a huge difference.

I cooked the onion, carrot and garlic in the olive oil and butter for about 5 minutes to soften them.  Then I added the tomatoes and everything else except the paste.  The original recipe called for two celery stalks to cook in the sauce and get removed at the end, but I substituted a bit of celery salt instead.

I brought it to a boil and then reduced it to low, covered it, and let it simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.  One thing I noticed was that it was not the brilliant red I usually associate with tomato sauce.  It was kind of orange, but the romas had looked fairly pale (although I grabbed the reddest I could find) so I didn't think too much of it.

After two hours I put in the tomato paste and set it to simmer for another 2 hours.  It cooked down fairly well, although it sort of ended up looking like a stew more than a sauce.  Once it was done, I let it cool and tossed it in the food processor to puree it smooth.

So here's the first part of the possible fail.  I'm not sure I like how it came out at all.  It doesn't taste disgusting, but it's not what I was hoping for, either.  It's kind of bland, and the flavors that are in it don't taste right.  I believe my problem is the tomatoes, which is of course the majority of the sauce.  It's the middle of winter, and the tomatoes are clearly from hothouses and from storage, so they don't have the flavor of summer tomatoes at all.  Honestly, canned sauce is probably better than what I made.

So, I'm not really sure what to do.  My plan was for pizza, and maybe this sauce will be just fine, but I was hoping for so much more.

Now we come to the second possible fail; my oven.  It has been slowly dying for a very long time.  It's temperatures are so far off I have to use a separate thermometer to check when it gets to the right one.  Half the burners don't work.  But today the oven decided to stop working.  I was still able to make the sauce just fine, but I obviously can't make a pizza until I get a new stove.  We'll go shopping tomorrow, but we'll have to wait for a new one to get delivered and such before I can do any baking.

I may try the sauce on pasta.  If so, I'll report back, but I don't have high hopes.

I'll definitely try again in the summer with good tomatoes, or possibly try one of the recipes that use canned tomatoes so I can still get on with a pizza.