Anchored Meadows LLC

One of the most common questions I get from others just getting into home canning is how they can get their tomato sauce or paste thicker without having to cook it down for hours. In Virginia's summers, nobody in their right mind wants to wait for that! 🥵 So after much trial and error, I have found a solution! 🙌🏼

Take your cored (and optionally seeded--we use a spoon to scoop them out after halving them) tomatoes, add salt to them (adds flavor and draws out more water) and place them on a parchment paper-covered baking sheet and roast in the oven for 40 minutes at 400⁰. Once finished, you can optionally remove the skins once they've cooled or keep the skins on and blend in a food processor or with an immersion blender. Then either can as you would normally as paste (it will be THICK!) or add other ingredients to make chunky spaghetti sauce.

This highly reduces the time you need for processing and gives you that store-bought thickness we all likely seek (unless you like the thinner stuff 🤷🏻‍♀️).