Canning Homemade Tomato Sauce

Enjoy fresh, homemade pizza sauce, even in the depths of winter.

By Patrice Lewis
Updated on June 24, 2024
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by Adobestock/fahrwasser

Tomato-based sauces are immensely satisfying projects that can be homegrown and homemade from start to finish. The beginnings of my first batch of pizza sauce started with 18 tomato plants we’d planted.

Paste tomatoes are the best option for creating sauces, since they have more “meat” and less liquid. That said, you can use any tomatoes if you have the patience to cook the puréed tomatoes down to sufficient thickness. I ended up using non-paste tomatoes, and here’s what happened.

Ripening Tomatoes

Most tomatoes won’t fully ripen before the first frost in our short-season northern climate. Each fall, right before the first frost kills the garden, we harvest every green tomato we can pluck off the plants. We take them indoors, lay them in an enclosed box, drop in a couple of bananas or apples, and enjoy ripe red tomatoes for two months. (Bananas and apples are abundant natural sources of the fruit-ripening gas ethylene.) As an extra precaution, we often drape netting over the box to keep fruit flies away.

As the tomatoes ripen, we collect them and run them through a food strainer to remove seeds and skin. We bag the resulting tomato purée in 1-gallon bags and freeze them. When deep winter comes, it’s time to turn this summer bounty into tomato sauce, including pizza sauce.

As a rule of thumb, it takes about 6-1/2 pounds of tomatoes to produce a quart of finished pizza tomato sauce. Use this to estimate how many tomatoes you’ll need and how much finished product will result from your harvest.

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