- Hi, I'm Jerry James Stone
and you're watching, Cooking Stoned.
On today's episode, we're gonna make a tomato sauce.
We're gonna make a homemade tomato sauce.
The thing about a tomato sauce is this,
tomato sauce is not just
tomatoes that have been sauced.
It's not just about having
tomatoes in this sort of format.
It's actually about creating a sauce
that really highlights the tomato.
It's not quite a spaghetti sauce, it's simple.
There's a little bit of herbs and there is a trick to
highlighting those tomatoes.
That's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna start by mincing our onion.
Pull the peel.
Let's go ahead and chop it up.
We're gonna chop up our celery.
I mentioned that tomato sauce is all about
highlighting the tomatoes, so,
some people use carrot, I use celery because
celery adds a salt component to the sauce,
but carrots add salt and sugar.
You can do it with carrots, but that would be wrong,
and we don't want that, right?
We're just gonna mince this up here,
as nicely as we possibly can.
The onion and the celery,
we're gonna go ahead and sweat those
in the pan for a little bit.
To begin with, we're gonna add a fourth cup of olive oil,
and warm that over a
medium-low heat.
Then, we're gonna sweat the onions and the celery.
The onions and the celery are in there, and the olive oil.
Heat is medium-low, we're gonna add a pinch of salt.
We're just gonna cook these over a medium-lowish heat,
and sweat them.
The key here is you don't want them to
golden or anything like that.
You just want to bring out the moisture and cook them down.
This should take about 10 to 15 minutes,
if you do it properly.
Like I said, a really low heat is what you want here.
These are cooking down nicely, so,
as one might expect with the term sweating is,
you're just pulling all the moisture out,
so you can see they become really, really wet.
They look sweaty.
We're just gonna keep cookin' this down, cookin' this down,
This is just to intensify the flavor.
You wanna get that bite from the onion
and that salt from the celery.
This has been about,
just about eight minutes right now,
so I still have about double the time to go.
Now that those are cooked down,
we're gonna add in our four cloves of garlic.
Let's go ahead and get that in there.
Love the smell of garlic.
Never go wrong with that.
We're just gonna cook that
just for about a minute on its own.
We're gonna add in our salt, our sugar,
and a splash of white balsamic vinegar.
That's just to bring up the acidity
on this dish because,
like I said, we wanna just highlight
the tomatoes, that's the key, is to highlight their flavor.
We're not tryin' to alter them like you would
with a spaghetti sauce,
where you use a lot of herbs to take it to the next level.
We're just tryin' to showcase why we freakin' love tomatoes.
Just add the salt and sugar in there, and the vinegar.
I'm gonna turn up the heat a little bit.
You wanna cook this down more, but you do not want
the ingredients to brown, that's really important.
Just cook it for a few more minutes, like this.
I forgot to mention what we're gonna do in this step,
when we turn up the heat is,
we're tryin' to cook down any of the remaining liquids.
We spent that time sweating the onion and the celery,
and now we're just tryin' to remove that liquid.
You want the heat up high enough to do that, but,
like I said, you do not want it to brown.
That's lookin' pretty good there.
You can see everything's really starting to cook down.
We're gonna add a tablespoon of tomato paste.
We're just gonna mix that around a bit,
getting everything coated
in this nice, lovely tomato paste.
It's starting to smell really good, you can just
smell all those vegetables.
When we add the tomatoes, this is gonna be really lovely.
We're gonna add in our San Marzano tomatoes, carefully.
You know how it is.
They can, seriously, power cars with tomato sauce.
The slightest bump,
or momentum, and the stuff
can seriously splatter across the room.
The reason we're using San Marzano tomatoes,
this is actually the key ingredient
to making a good sauce.
San Marzano tomatoes are actually what
Roma tomatoes are based on, but
San Marzano tomatoes,
they have a thicker flesh, they have less seeds,
and they have a more intense flavor.
They're really what you wanna use
when you're making a sauce.
Any other tomato is just not acceptable.
We're gonna add this in, I had two cans of whole
San Marzano tomatoes.
I just crushed them with my hand.
You can crush them with anything, but,
really, your hand is the best tool.
Now, we're just going to bring this to a simmer.
We're going to, then, turn it down
and let it cook for about an hour.
You want it to be about an hour,
and probably a little bit more.
You want the consistency of breakfast cereal.
This just has to thicken up.
It's cookin' down quite nicely here.
We have about a half hour left.
I'm gonna go ahead and add in our fresh thyme.
Add this in towards the end.
This is just to really brighten up the sauce.
We're not tryin' to overly flavor it,
it's really, once again,
as I've said, just to complement the tomato.
Just continue to let that cook
for about another 30 minutes.
It's smelling so good, let's take a little taste.