Recipe: DiZazzo home made pasta sauce! pt.2

This post is a continuation of my first 'home made pasta sauce' post.

Lets get all the prep and other stuff sorted out!

Instructions

Prepping the tomato sauce

We need to blend the tomatoes to break them down into smaller pieces. Keep in mind, the longer you blend them, the smaller the tomato pieces will be, and the more "watery" your sauce will be. I like to grind my tomatoes on a "pulse" setting for literally under two seconds (super blender!). This leaves somewhat medium-small size chunks of tomato, which gives a nice rich flavour to the sauce.

1. First thing you want to do is to open all your canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Set them aside.
2. Add 1/2 cup of canola oil to the bottom of the empty sauce pot. Let it heat and spread across the bottom completely. Turn heat up to 3-4 (medium-low).
   
3. Empty the contents of a single can into the blender, and add a single can of tomato paste. Fill up the empty can of tomatoes half way with water and add that to the blender. Blend on a low setting for 1-2 seconds at a time, checking until desired consistency is reached.
4. Pour the blended tomatoes into the sauce pot! Repeat until done.

Now it's time to chop and fry some garlic. I've made a few videos for you. They're super interesting. Of me. Chopping .... garlic. Okay maybe they're not that interesting. Here they are anyway. (Please excuse the extremely poor sound quality, camera mic)

A note for the second video, at the end there's quite a bit of garlic left in the pan after I empty it into the sauce, I had to put the camera away to salvage all of it. Make sure you scrape the pan clean and get all the garlic in your sauce!

Now that we've chopped and fried garlic, we need to add the rest of the spices to the sauce. Remember to check my first post for the quantities!!

1. Add the basil. Grind it up in your hands and sprinkle it in if you have fresh stuff!
   
2. Add the salt.
   
3. Add the sugar.
4. Half the onion and put each into the sauce. This absorbs a lot of the acidity from the tomatoes and I think it's a pretty important addition to the sauce!
   

At this point, the base tomato sauce is complete. It's really that simple. Here's the kicker.

It needs to boil for 4-5 hours until a thick consistency is reached!

The truth is, the slower you cook something, for some reason, the better it tastes. Mind you, there are exceptions, but this is not one of them. When I made this sauce, my pot was as full as you saw in the basil picture. It boiled to about just over half that amount, and that was adding meat (which increased the total volume of solid items displacing sauce).

I'm going to leave you with this final video showing you how to stir the sauce so that its mixed well!

Check my next post for instructions for a meat sauce and pork side ribs (so so so good!).