Hey, there, welcome back.
Lacey here with "A Sweet Pea Chef" and now that we're following this clean eating lifestyle,
we're choosing whole foods, I think it's time we talk about store-bought tomato sauce or
marinara sauce.
Believe it or not, so many of those tomato sauce options at the store are loaded with
unnecessary and even harmful ingredients like sugar and trans fats, making them not a good
thing to be pouring all over our food.
So, the good news though is that making your own homemade tomato sauce is actually super
easy to do and it's even better than the store-bought stuff.
So, let me show you how to make it.
Before I forget, make sure to go and subscribe to this channel so you get my new weekly recipe
videos every week and you get all sorts of healthy eating inspiration.
And then, go and say "Hi" in the comments below and I'll say "Hi" too.
Our first step is to start preheating our oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
For this recipe, we're going to need either a large casserole dish or a rimmed baking
sheet lined with parchment paper.
You want something that has sides on it so that we catch all of those juices and those
stay in our pan and not in our oven.
I like using roma tomatoes for when I make my roasted tomato sauce because they have
very few seeds and they're really flavorful, but most any fresh tomatoes will work.
So, now, we're going to rinse off our tomatoes and make sure we remove any of the dirt because
you do not want that in your tomato sauce.
Also, in case you're wondering, we are going to be roasting these tomatoes because that
really intensifies the flavor of the tomatoes.
You could just cook all of this on the stove, which is another option, but I love the roasting
part because the garlic and the carrots and the onion and the tomato, which you will see,
become so much more rich.
Now, we're going to slice our tomatoes in half through the stem and then we're going
to take those tomato halves and place them face down, so the skin side is up into our
casserole dish or our prepared baking sheet.
Now add in some yellow onion that we've cut into wedges, a large carrot that's been diced
into large chunks and several peeled cloves of garlic.
It's totally fine for the carrot and the onion to just have it be just in chunks because
we're going to be blending everything so you don't have to worry about making all the cuts
perfect.
And now, sprinkle with a little bit of sea salt and some ground black pepper and then
you can try to make this as even and one layer as possible, but it's going to have a little
bit of overlap so it's okay if things are on top of each other.
Just try to spread out as evenly as possible.
Finally, we're going to drizzle a little bit of olive oil over everything in our pan.
Now, we're going to transfer this into the oven and we're going to bake for about 60
to 75 minutes.
We're looking for the tomatoes and the onions and the carrots to become tender, and the
skin on the tomatoes is going to start to wrinkle a little bit and the onion is going
to get a little bit crispy right at the edges, and your house is going to smell amazing.
It's going to smell like roasted garlic and baked tomatoes.
Going to be so yummy.
Now, carefully remove the pan from the oven and we're going to let this sit for a few
minutes until the tomatoes are cool enough to touch.
Because the tomato skin can be a little papery and can make our sauce a little chunky if
you want to remove that, which we're going to be doing today, we are just going to just
carefully pinch the edges of the tomatoes and then that's going to pick up that skin.
You'll see it just comes right off.
And that's why we want the tomatoes to be cool enough to the touch.
Now, we're going to carefully transfer all of this roasted goodness, including all those
juices into either a food processor or a blender, or if you're going to mash it by hand, you
can transfer it into a large mixing bowl.
Then, we're going to follow that up with some tomato paste and some fresh basil leaves.
And then we're going to blend until smooth.
So, you might be wondering at this point why your tomato sauce looks a little bit more
of like a burnt orange color rather than a deep red color.
That's because when we blend our sauce, we're actually introducing a lot of air into the
sauce.
So, there's a few ways to fix that if it really bugs you.
One is you can just mash everything by hand and you just don't ever introduce that into
a blender.
Another is you can instead use whole peeled tomatoes that are canned instead of fresh
tomatoes because those are going to be deeper in color anyway.
And the other way is to actually blend all of those veggies and the tomatoes and everything
together ahead of time before we cook them and then cook them on the stove instead of
the oven.
So, if it really bugs you, you can do any of those three steps.
Personally, it tastes delicious and I add a little bit of tomato paste to make it just
a little bit of a deeper color and it's just...it's going to be good no matter what.
So, at this point, just go ahead and taste the sauce, see if you need any more salt or
pepper and then add that in as needed.
And if you wanted to add any custom flavors into this, like some strutted Parmesan, now
would be the time as well.
And then you would just blend it all together.
We love using this roasted tomato sauce on so many things like my chicken Parmesan, my
spaghetti, and my sweet potato lasagna.
And it's so awesome to know that what you're eating not only tastes good but it's good
for you.
If you have leftovers, this tomato sauce is super easy to store.
We do it all the time, just place it into the fridge and an airtight container like
a mason jar and it'll last for up to five or seven days.
Or if you want to freeze it, it will last up to six months in your freezer, which is
really awesome.
We usually divide it into, like, three to four cup portions and then freeze those individually.
That way when you're ready to use it, you can either take it and defrost it in, like,
some running water or you can put it in your fridge overnight and have it ready to use
the next day.
Super awesome.
So, thanks so much for watching, make sure to give this video a thumbs up if you like
it and don't forget to go check out my sweet potato lasagna and my chicken Parmesan meal
prep recipe videos, which I have linked for you because those are some are really good
recipes to use this sauce in.
All right.
Thanks so much for being here with me today.
I will see you later.
Bye Bye.
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