Home Made Spaghetti Sauce!
by Ken Mathews




It’s always a little difficult for me to say goodbye to summer. I love my garden and everything that grows in my yard, except the weeds of course. But, Labor Day has come and gone. Though it’s still officially summer for three more weeks, every New Englander knows, Labor Day marks the end of the real summer.

I’m always very pressed for time from late August into October. There’s so much to do to get the garden and plants ready for winter. I have over 150 varieties of daylilies and perform two to four hundred crosses with them each year, trying to create some new varieties of my own. This is the time for harvesting and cataloging the seeds. It’s also the perfect time for trimming, dividing and transplanting daylilies, and my annual reshuffling of them throughout the yard. They, alone, could keep me busy! But’ it’s harvest time for the vegetable garden too. Adding to the workload, it’s time to start getting the woodpile ready for the upcoming winter. It’s finally cool enough to almost enjoy splitting and stacking firewood. Since our house is all electric, keeping the wood stoves going during the winter is essential.

Yes, it’s harvest time! The tomatoes are ripening at a fierce pace now. When the early ones started ripening in July, it was a real treat. This year, the early ones did well enough for us to have more than what we needed for table use. We even gave some away to friends, and made several small batches of our specialty – spaghetti sauce.

Toward the end of August, the main crop tomatoes were ripening more rapidly every day. I grow at least 100 tomato plants each year. In a good season like this, I’m picking a couple of 5 gallon pails full every day or so. Keeping up with them is a challenge. We love our homemade spaghetti sauce, but making it is a time consuming process. Over the years, by trial and error, we’ve found some shortcuts that help speed up the process. This year, we’ve finally achieved a pace of one batch per day by having two or three batches in progress at a time. Now, when I say “batch”, I’m talking about 12-14 quarts of sauce. We package it in gallon size freezer bags, about 1 ½ to 2 quarts to a bag, then freeze it. We always seem to have enough to make it through to the next season, having spaghetti once a week and lasagna once every month or two.

Well, here’s how we push that much sauce through the kitchen while both my wife and I work full time during the week . . .

We start of with two 5 gallon pails full of tomatoes and two 16 quart stainless steel pots. The thickness of the stainless steel is essential. Tomatoes scorch on the bottom all the time in those cheap thin ones. I tried an aluminum pot a few years ago. That was a disaster. The acid in tomatoes reacts with the aluminum very quickly. I’ll never let tomatoes see aluminum again. Never!

We start the process by pouring a pail full of tomatoes into the stainless steel kitchen sink. Ours is a double sink, so the other side’s free to hold two essential items. A one gallon ice cream container for the stems and pieces of the tomatoes we cut off, along with one of those curly metal scouring pads. Not a steel wool pad, but one of those course metallic one that don’t hold soap.

Now, we bring in the magic timesaver. A blender. We cut off the black spots and stems of the tomatoes then cut them into chunks about ¼ the size of a tennis ball. This is a big time saver, and we don’t have to peel the tomatoes. For the first blender full, we start with a few chunks about half that size at the bottom, to help the blender along. We fill the blender then run it through on chop or liquefy for a few seconds, until it sounds right. That’s when it sounds like a swirling liquid and you can’t hear the chunks hitting the blades. Then, we pour all but two to three inches of the liquid into the stainless steel pan, leaving some liquid in the bottom to help the blender with the next tomato chunks.

One 5 gallon pail of tomatoes is just about the right amount for each large pot. I’ve speed up the process of getting them to an evaporation boil by filling one half way with the heat on high, then moving it to the further burner on the stove and filling the second pot half way, occasionally pouring a blender full into the first pot just as it’s ready to boil. By doing it that way, both pots are just about at a boil when the first pail of tomatoes is blended. The second pail of tomatoes is then alternated between the two pots to keep the heating as even as possible. When the pots are about ¾ full, I let them come to a full boil. Tomatoes always froth up as they reach the boiling point. That’s the signal to turn the heat down a little and let them reach a rolling boil. The rest of the tomatoes can be added at just about the pace they can be prepared without too much frothing. Once both pots are at a rolling boil, it’s time to turn the heat down a bit to keep them from scorching on the bottom of the pot. Now they’re ready for about 6-8 hours of evaporation. We try to reduce the volume by 50%.

During the week, when we can’t get a batch started until evening, I tried something new this year. Just before going to bed, I spend about half an hour adjusting the heat to a slower evaporation rate, just below the boiling point. Six to eight hours at the lower heat works quite well. Since I’m a light sleeper, I usually check on them once or twice during the night, giving them a stir to be sure they aren’t scorching.

Once the volume is reduced by about 50%, the tomatoes have to cool down for a few hours before the second half of the process. That’s where the overnight cooking really pays off, the batch is cooling while we’re both off at work and it’s ready for the next process when we get home.

The second process my wife and I do differently. We have a chinois, which is a cone shaped colander that rests in a wire frame and has a wooden pestle to swish around the inside of the cone to force the liquid, paste and small particles of pulp through the small holes in the chinois, removing the seeds and peel. This is a tedious process, taking a hour or two per batch. After a lot of observation and experimenting, I have found a way of speeding it up quite a bit. I put the cooled tomato base in the blender and run it on liquefy for 20-30 seconds. This blends the juice with the pulp and separates more pulp form the peels in the process. It also batters some of the seeds, so a few small seed particles make it through the straining process, but it cuts the work and time of this process by more than 50% and I don’t mind the small seed particles.

Now, we heat up the strained sauce to let it evaporate down another 10 percent or so, making a thicker sauce. While this is in progress, we scramble hamburger, along with fresh chopped onion and add it to the sauce. My wife likes to add the rest of the spices to the hamburger while it is cooking. I like to add them to the sauce itself. I think you get more benefit out of the spices that way, not loosing some of them in the fat that we drain off the hamburger before adding it to the sauce.

So, that’s the speed method we’ve refined over the years. We have a couple smaller pots and another 16 quart pot that’s fairly thin stainless. We pour the finished sauce into them so we can start the next batch in the two cooking pots.

The first Sunday in September, I had 8 pails of tomatoes ready for making sauce. Normally, even with our fast method, that would be four batches and take four days, if we didn’t loose any time. I set a new production record Sunday and Monday. I started one batch Sunday morning, so it had cooked down 50% by evening. I poured that batch into the smaller pots to cool overnight, and then started a second batch to cook overnight. They both cooled all day Monday. When I got home from work that evening, I put both batches through the second part of the process using both cooking pots. When they were done, I poured them into three smaller pots, and then started a third batch. That took care of 6 pails of tomatoes in a hurry. They don’t keep long in the pails, so it was important to push them through as quickly as I could. It’s a shame to loose ripe tomatoes because - they got ahead of you!

I think we’ve caught up. Good thing, there’s so many other things to do before winter. Even with all this sauce production, I think we’ll have spaghetti this Wednesday evening. Angel hair sounds good, with plenty of grated Parmesan cheese on top of the sauce!

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About the Author;
Introduction and Background I was born in Nashua, NH in 1948 as our country was recovering from World War II. A few days later, my parents took me home to Hollis, NH, where I lived until going off to college in 1967. My mother was a Hollis native, where my grandparents, her mother and father, lived. My Father was born in Brookline, NH, just west of Hollis. His mother, who was a widow long before I was born, lived in Brookline on the family farm. That area of Southern NH, bordered by the Nissitissett, Nashua, Souhegn and Merrimack rivers was the setting where I experienced life for my first 20 years. Hollis and Brookline were both small New England towns where everybody knew everybody, literally. Most of the people were at least third or fourth generation residents. There was no serious crime, no full time police force and for the most part, people didn’t even think about locking their house doors. There was no need.

The people, their culture and values were very conservative. The landscape, with hundreds of acres of woods, orchards and farmland, has numerous ponds and streams. The largest pond, Long Pond, eventually was renamed Silver Lake. The State of New Hampshire took over the north end of the lake in the 1950’s and made it into “Silver Lake State Park”. That was our major tourist attraction. On hot summer afternoons, particularly on weekends, it was always filled to capacity. Those were the days the “townies” stayed away.

It’s now been half a century since my very earliest memories, shaped by the rural life and culture that is rapidly becoming extinct. In my writing, every now and then, there will be traces of this culture and the values of rural Southern New Hampshire and the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire and Northern Massachusetts.

Ken@boomerjournals.com