WetLeather Recipe Database - food for bikers

Name:	I made a tomato sauce	Contributor:	Jack Tavares
Description:	tomato sauce	Posted:	2008-10-16
Key words:	tomato, egypt	Category:	Sauces
ID:	862	Updated:	2008-10-16 07:40:25
Ingredients:	2 kilos fresh tomato(e)s 2 heads garlic 4 red onions[1] fresh (frozen) basil 4 or 5 red chili peppers oregano thyme salt pepper sugar sherry vinegar
Preparation:	cut up the red onions[1] add olive oil to large soup/stock pan saute onions on high heat for about 5 minutes. turn down heat. peel garlic. throw all the garlic into a mini food processor (no oil) with some salt and pepper spin the crap out of em until they are finely diced. put diced garlic in pan. turn heat back up. saute for a minute or two, chunk up the tomatos. Did not dice, cut in maybe 1/8 s or 1/16s. dump in tomatos add salt, pepper, thyme and oregano add about 1 cup of tomato juice. Remember that you wanted to add chilis Get chilis out of freezer [2] cut up chilis throw in pot. Bring to a roiling boil, reduce heat to simmer and reduce moisture. Email wife: ask her to stop and get basil since we have none. Get email back saying "is there a reason you don't want to use the frozen basil in the freezer?"[2] Frozen basil works great for this. It crumbles when cut which is way easier than trying to shred it. Throw in basil. let simmer for another hour or so taste.
Notes:	[1] 4 red onions sounds like a LOT of red onions. But there are several factors at work the onions are small here the onions have very thick skins the onions have very thick and tough cores there is a lot of rot and mold on the onion. By the time you end up cleaning up what you have, 4 egyptian red onions is probably equal to 2 small US red onions or 1 large US red onion. [2] You had to look RIGHT AT the frozen basil in the freezer to get frozen chili peppers. Doh. I added some sherry vinegar near the end which gave it a nice depth. I also did something that I have never done with my pasta sauces before: I added a small amount of sugar. maybe a teaspoon or two I poured some into the palm of my hand and said "that looks about right" Not much, but the sauce had an "edge", sort of in the back of the throat. Acidity from the tomatos or maybe the vinegar. The sugar did not materially change the _taste_ of the sauce but cut that edge. If that makes sense. This resulted in a somewhat chunky sauce LOADED with garlic.
Equipment:	Kaddee bought a big ass[1] soup/stock pot a while ago. I have actually gone downstairs to the student cafeteria, and in broken arabic/english/hand gestures asked the egyptian equivalent of the lunch lady with a hair net[2] to borrow a pot because our pots aren't big enough for stock/sauce. We have looked for bigger pots, but they were all crap Thin walled, and poorly made. She finally found one that was decent 18/10 stainless and looked like it would hold up. So she bought it. It is made in Turkey (I hate to say it, but if you want something of decent quality, materials and workmanship, if it says "made in egypt" look for an import) Great pot for stock, soups and big batches of tomato sauce. As I was cleaning it the last time, I looked at the bottom of it and it said had four picture/symbols and under each one it had a caption GAS ELECTRIC VITRO INDUCTION Signifying that it would work on any of those type stoves. My question is, what the heck is VITRO? [1] not martin values of "big ass". or even jack values of making-5-gallons-of-wort-from-scratch,big ass, but egyptian ex-pat big ass. What martin would probably call "cute" [2] Except there is no hair net. And there are no women in the kitchen cafeteria[3] [3] There are almost NO women in service jobs in egypt. They are almost all men.