Tomato-based sauces are immensely satisfying projects that can be homegrown and homemade from start to finish. The beginnings of my first batch of pizza sauce started with 18 tomato plants we’d planted.
Paste tomatoes are the best option for creating sauces, since they have more “meat” and less liquid. That said, you can use any tomatoes if you have the patience to cook the puréed tomatoes down to sufficient thickness. I ended up using non-paste tomatoes, and here’s what happened.
Ripening Tomatoes
Most tomatoes won’t fully ripen before the first frost in our short-season northern climate. Each fall, right before the first frost kills the garden, we harvest every green tomato we can pluck off the plants. We take them indoors, lay them in an enclosed box, drop in a couple of bananas or apples, and enjoy ripe red tomatoes for two months. (Bananas and apples are abundant natural sources of
