Making Tomato Sauce With My Aunt Carmella

There was always something incredible about the tomato sauce my family served on holidays or on Sunday visits to my grandmother’s. Maybe as a kid I magically attributed this to the simple fact that it was Christmas and all of the other wonderful things that went along with it. It was only until much later that I discovered the truth. This wasn’t any old, ordinary canned tomato sauce from our local supermarket. These were jarred preserves that my family made once a year! So now I had to learn how to make it myself. That “now” was over twenty years ago and I had begun to think that I’d live condemned to a life of that inferior supermarket supermarket product. Then in 2015 it finally happened! One Saturday in October my aunt Carmella and my cousins Raffaella and John had us over and showed us how it’s done. It was a full day’s work, but we came home with a year’s worth of tomato sauce to cover any special event or just a simple Sunday dinner.

Below is the step by step procedure we followed along with pictures!
Step One: Fresh Basil Leaves are Placed at the Bottom of Empty Mason Jars.
Step Two: Time to inspect and clean the tomatoes.

Only the freshest pass the test and are permitted to proceed to step three. However, if a tomato had a little bit of a "blemish" then it was surgically removed with a knife.  Why waste a whole tomato? Christine and the little ones were in charge if this detail!  
Step Three: Time to cook the tomatoes!
The purpose of this step is to loosen the skins from the tomatoes. This way the juice will squeeze out more easily when we get to step five.
Step Four: This kind of looks like a tomato coffin! Well, at this point they have been removed from the boiling water and are rinsing out a bit before being squeezed! Tomatoes are left to rinse before being put through the wringer!
Step Five: The tomatoes are are pressed through a conveniently modern little machine and the juice is captured in containers.
You will want to run the tomatoes through the machine a second time on order to keep the finished product from being too watery. This photo gives a clearer idea of how the machine works.
Step Six: We funnel the tomatoes into our basil ready Mason Jars.
Step Seven: Now the mason jars are in water and waiting to be vacuum sealed. Just listen for each jar to go "pop" which will tell you when tney are ready.
And finally our sauce is ready for our enjoyment with friends and family throughout the coming holiday season! These Mason Jars are filled and ready for the final step.