A Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe That Gives You Perfect Results Every Time And Delivers Maximum Health Benefits
It's all about the ratio
Who can resist the mouthwatering aroma of a great tomato sauce?
Whether you are making a soup, stew, or pasta, cooking Italian, French, Spanish or Mexican . . . .tomato sauce is a staple of home cooked goodness.
The problem with most online recipes is that they either call for canned tomatoes (which are often heavily processed and over-salted) or call for the tomatoes to be skinned and seedless. And other pasta and dinner recipes call for pre-made bottled sauces which have become ridiculously overpriced in this latest round of food-inflation.
But there is a way to avoid all of that and create your own, healthy tomato sauce base quickly and easily.
Let’s take a look at the incredible health benefits of tomatoes and a simple tomato sauce recipe that is my go-to for preserving the tomato harvest to use all year long.
The Health Benefits of Tomatoes
Botanically, tomatoes are the fruits of the common tomato plant Solanum lycopersicum L. Tomatoes come in many varieties, sizes and colors thanks to generations of selective breeding by food-loving growers the world over. I am entirely bias and believe that heirloom tomato varieties are hands-down the best for flavor.
However, unlike most fruits that we eat, tomatoes are usually found in savory dishes and that is why we consider tomatoes to be vegetables from a culinary perspective.
Whether you think of them as fruits or vegetables, tomatoes are a highly prized bioactive food. Tomatoes are packed with minerals, especially calcium, magnesium and potassium. They are also packed with vitamins like Vitamin C, folate and Beta-carotene (check out the profile of a Roma tomato here in the USDA FoodData Central).
But the number one reason tomatoes are a super-healthy choice is a component called Lycopene.
What is Lycopene?
Lycopene is a naturally occurring plant pigment known as a carotenoid, which gives tomatoes their luscious red color. It is related to Beta-carotene, and occurs in plants that are red, pink, orange or yellow.
The lycopene found in tomatoes specifically has been shown to help prevent cardiovascular disease. A 2022 review paper published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences indicates that lycopene is both a powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agent.
Including tomatoes in your daily diet can:
Reduce the probability of developing cardiovascular disease,
Reduce the size of arterial plaques (atherosclerosis),
Reduce high blood pressure (hypertension), and
Provide anti-oxidant benefits.
Lycopene is a very safe and stable compound, even when heated. Dried tomatoes are the best way to consume lycopene for maximum health benefits, but fresh tomatoes and tomato-based sauces are also good sources.
Lycopene has also been well studied as an anti-cancer agent. A 2023 paper published in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy reviews the data showing that lycopene inhibits the growth of cancer cells and prevents their migration in the body (metastasis). It has shown promising anti-cancer benefits in research involving brain, breast, liver, lung and leukemia cancers.
How do you get the most lycopene?
While the red pigment is found throughout the tomato, the highest concentration of lycopene is in the skin. So now do you get my opening point about commercial sauces and even homemade recipes telling you to skin your tomatoes!?! Wrong advice!
If you are consuming tomato products that don’t have the skin included you are missing out on the very best part of the tomato and the highest health benefits that you should be getting from eating tomatoes.
Peeling tomatoes results in a 71% loss of lycopene, a 50% loss of Beta-carotene and a 14% loss of Vitamin C according to this 2014 study.
So the message is EAT YOUR PEELS, PLEASE!
Your body will thank you!
The bioavailability of lycopene actually improves with heat. That makes cooking and drying tomatoes healthy choices in your diet, although eating fresh tomatoes will preserve more of the other vitamin components mentioned earlier. Just make sure to be including those skins no matter how you prepare the fruit/vegetable.
A Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe
To get the biggest health benefit from your homegrown or market fresh tomatoes this season, follow this simple ratio - recipe.
The magic ratio is: 4:1:1 4 cups to 1 Tbsp to 1 tsp
Ingredients:
4 cups diced tomatoes, core removed, but skin and seeds included
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
Steps:
Wash your tomatoes. Remove the core and any dark lines, blemishes, or green spots.
Chop the whole tomato. Remember that the skins will not break down all that much in the cooking so if you don’t want big pieces of skin then dice the tomatoes smaller.
To your heavy stock pot, add 4 cups of chopped tomatoes with skin and seeds included, 1 Tbsp of sugar, and 1 tsp of salt. Stir.
— Let me repeat that: For EVERY 4 cups of tomatoes added to your pot, you then add the 1 Tbsp sugar and 1 tsp of salt. My stock holds 12 cups of tomatoes so I repeat the 4:1:! ratio 3 times to make a whole batch of sauce at once.
Bring the tomatoes to a simmer, and continue simmer until the contents is reduce by about 1/2. Cook longer for a thicker sauce, but I find 1/2 to be perfect for most uses.
You can go further and add your other sauce ingredients and spices, but I prefer to do this at the cooking stage of a recipe rather than put all that into the sauce. I like the results better.
To save the sauce for later use, can it following safe canning procedures or freeze.
I prefer to freeze mine, so I first let the sauce start to cool down on the stove and then put the pot into the fridge until it is well chilled. I then use zip-lock freezer bags and freeze 1 cup and 2 cup portions for use in soups and sauces all year long.
How to use this simple tomato sauce?
Straight from the pot, this recipe gives you an amazing tomato soup. That’s why I like to freezer some 1 cup portions. Just grab one of those, heat it up and top with some onions, cheese and croutons for a fast lunch.
For other meals, I use this sauce as the equivalent of the canned tomatoes called for in most online recipes. For example, to make a spaghetti sauce I sauté hamburger, onions, carrots and celery (and sometimes mushrooms), then add 2 cups of my simple tomato sauce. Simmer and add Italian seasoning. Done.
Don’t Miss Out On The Benefits of Tomatoes
Eating tomatoes daily - fresh, dried or sauced - is one of the simplest preventative health measures you can take. But the real key to that success is including the tomato skins.
If you try this recipe and still don’t like the results, you can throw the mix in a blender and get rid of any trace of the peels and seeds. However, sometimes blending up the seeds can give the overall sauce a harsh flavor that I am not fond of.
While I am not a fan of adding sugar, in this case, that small amount of sugar helps to balance the acidity of the tomatoes and produces a better result. But in the end, you be the judge. Adjust the 4:1:1 ratio to your specific liking.
And just FYI, tomato variety doesn’t really alter the ratio in my experience. My favorite way to make this sauce is by combining paste type tomatoes (I grow Roma, Amish and one my neighbor gave me so I just call that one Christoph’s) and meatier table style tomatoes (I grow Cherokee, Sioux, Glacier, and another neighbor has just introduced me to Krim which I will probably start including next year). I like the result of mixing them all and cooking it down. If you use only paste tomatoes your cooking time to 1/2 will be less, or if you use only beefsteaks and table tomatoes your cooking time will be longer.
Also the benefit of growing so many types of tomatoes for me is that if one crop is not doing well in the current climate conditions, another variety might be doing just fine. I hedge my bets to get a good crop every year. That’s why I include an early season tomato like Glacier in my main crop mix instead of just growing only Romas as the go-to sauce tomato.
Tomatoes are just too delicious to not include in your diet. This simple ratio-recipe for tomato sauce takes the guess work out making sure you get the maximum benefits from these amazing fruits that we use as vegetables.
Happy cooking!