I love making pasta sauce from scratch, but it can be so time consuming! There is an easy solution - making large amounts of sauce in advance and canning them. I do this with my spaghetti sauce and red pepper sauce. This makes for an incredibly easy meal down the road, all you have to do is cook the pasta and add sauce.
For this batch, I added more vegetables to the spaghetti sauce to add more nutrients and natural sweetness (a red pepper has more vitamin C than an orange!)
I do not have a canner so I froze my jars. There are guides on how to can without a canner, but just to be safe I froze mine. To defrost, I move one jar to the fridge at least a day before I want to make pasta.
I used the giant cans of crushed tomatoes from Costco. I used one 106 oz can for each recipe, and each recipe made 5 batches of about 24 ounces each.
Vegetable Marinara
Ingredients
- 4 onions (I bought a 3 pound bag of yellow onions and used half in each recipe)
- 2 red peppers
- 4 carrots (or half of a 1 pound bag)
- A whole head of garlic (ok to skip some of the smaller cloves)
- About 1 cup of red wine, I used 1/3 of a bottle of Cabernet (optional)
- 106 ounce can of crushed tomatoes
- About 1 tablespoon each, or enough to sprinkle over the entire top of the sauce
- salt
- pepper
- garlic powder
- oregano
Directions
- Chop the onions, red pepper, and carrots.
- Add oil to a very large sauce pot, enough to coat the bottom.
- Add the vegetables and salt. Saute until the onions are clear and the peppers are soft ~15 minutes.
- Add the garlic and simmer for ~5 minutes.
- Add the wine, simmer for ~5 minutes.
- Add the tomatoes and other seasonings and stir to combine.
- If you are blending do that here.
- Simmer for at least 45 minutes, I did for about an hour and a half.
- Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.
- Let cool until no longer steaming before you start canning to avoid hurting yourself (speaking from experience).
Red Pepper Sauce
Ingredients
- 4 onions (I bought a 3 pound bag of yellow onions and used half in each recipe)
- 4 red peppers
- 2 jars of roasted red peppers
- A whole head of garlic (ok to skip some of the smaller cloves)
- About 1 cup of red wine, I used 1/3 of a bottle of Cabernet (optional)
- 106 ounce can of crushed tomatoes
- About 1 tablespoon each, or enough to sprinkle over the entire top of the sauce
- salt
- pepper
- garlic powder
- oregano
- cayenne pepper (I used 1 tablespoon for 5 batches of sauce, the overall spiciness was about a 3 on a scale of 1-10)
- red pepper flakes (optional)
Directions
- Chop the onions and raw red peppers. If you will be blending the sauce like me, you can use a rustic approach when chopping. They do not need to be the same size. If you will not be blending, I think thin, julienne strips would look best.
- Add oil to a very large sauce pot, enough to coat the bottom.
- Add the onions, red peppers, and salt. Saute until the onions are clear and the peppers are soft ~15 minutes.
- Add the garlic and roasted red peppers, simmer for ~5 minutes.
- Add the wine, simmer for another 5 or so minutes
- Add the tomatoes and other seasonings and stir to combine.
- If you are blending do that here.
- Simmer for at least 45 minutes, I did for an hour and a half.
- Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.
