Happy Summertime Friends!

With tomatoes ripe on the vine it is time to make our homemade marinara sauce. In todays blog post we are going to show you how to turn garden tomatoes into the best homemade marinara.

Garden Tomatoes

It seems like every home garden I see, big or small, makes room for tomatoes. It’s not hard to see why tomatoes are such a popular garden choice. Lots of people find them easy to grow, there is a wide variety to choose from, and they find their way into a lot of recipes. They can also be a lot of fun to grow, just watch this Tic Tok of me fertilizing my plants.

We use our tomatoes in more than just our homemade marinara sauce. We do a roasted salsa that is popular at snack time that you can find here. With just a little less work and just as much reward, we have a garden-fresh salsa recipe here. Filling up our recipe box takes time and we have not gotten to all of our favorite recipes yet. If you are looking for anything in particular let us know in the comment section and we will get it in the recipe box after the homemade marinara sauce.

THE BEST TOMATOES FOR MARINARA SAUCE

If you do not have fresh tomatoes you can use canned organic crushed tomatoes as they’re easy to find and make for a smooth sauce. Can you use canned whole tomatoes? Of course. If you use canned whole tomatoes just squish them between your hands or use a spatula to break them down while they cook. The texture will be a bit chunkier, but still delicious.

You can also make marina sauce from fresh whole tomatoes, it just takes a bit longer. Dice the tomatoes up and add them to your pot. They’ll take a bit longer to break down and you might want to use an immersion blender to make them smoother, but it’s always fun to see which texture you prefer best.

Marinara Sauce with Fresh Tomatoes

Making homemade marinara sauce is an excellent use for all those garden tomatoes you are going to produce. One of the complaints that I have heard about this though, is making homemade marinara sauce with garden-fresh tomatoes can be time-consuming. Who has 5 hours for a quick spaghetti meal?! The good news is that this homemade marinara sauce recipe freezes well, so you can make a big batch on a day where you have more time.

There are lots of reasons to choose to go with homemade marinara sauce over store-bought. They add a lot of extra sugar to most name brands, and we know that’s not very healthy. You can also make it to your standards. For instance, we make ours without mushrooms and that could be your favorite part. You can also grow most of the other ingredients in your own garden and everything tastes better when it comes from your garden.

Homemade Marinara Sauce Recipe

Cook Time: 5 hours

Ingredients:

• 3 heads of garlic, peeled (around 30 plus cloves)

• 5 large large tomatoes (I used heirloom) – cut into chunks

• 10 large different variety tomatoes (beef steak I used) – cut into chunks

• 3 medium to large white onions – quartered

• 1 cup basil leaves only not stems

• 1/2 cup oregano, roughly chopped or dried

• 3 Tablespoons salt (or more to taste)

• 1 Teaspoon ground black pepper

• 1 cup olive oil

Directions: Preheat oven to 425.

1. Combine: I use a large cookie sheet and add all of your tomatoes, garlic, onion, basil, oregano, salt, pepper, & olive oil.

2. Mix everything together thoroughly.

3. Place in oven, uncovered, and let roast for at least 5 hours.

4. Stir about every 30, especially the last 2 hours. Making sure there is still liquid and nothing is burning

5. After 5 hours could be less depending on the fluids left in your sheet, remove from oven and let cool for an hour or so.

6. Take blender and add several large spoonfuls to it.

7. Pulse the blender: 3 times for chunky sauce and approximately 8 plus times for smoother sauce. I like mine to have chunks in it!

8. Serve some immediately and can or freeze the rest. I use gallon freezer baggies to freeze mine if I do not want to can each batch.

I hope you enjoy making our homemade marinara sauce as much I liked sharing it. Let us know in the comment section how yours turned out.

Hugs,

Christina