Tomatoes & Ketchup

Holy Sh*t we are up to our eyeballs in tomatoes this year. Luckily we both enjoy cooking so Paul made a lot of marinara sauce using onions, garlic, and peppers all from the garden, and I made ketchup.

The ketchup recipe I ultimately ended up following suggested that I smoke some of the tomatoes. That worked out perfectly because Paul has been firing up the smoker on weekends when the tasting room is open and enticing guests with the aromas of ribs, brisket, sausages, and pork shoulder (and tomatoes).

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The first couple of batches of Paul’s marinara sauce did not include smoked tomatoes but the last ones did.  In the photos, the first pot of sauce is the marinara and the deeper hued one is my ketchup.  Interesting side note, I subbed in part of a leftover bottle of our Viognier for the cider vinegar and the next round had some leftover Chardonnay in it.

I have a tiny rant about the ketchup recipe if you’ll indulge me for a moment.  The instructions are to blanch the tomatoes first and then peel off the skins.  I absolutely refuse to do this step. In winemaking we leave the skins on and then after pressing we discard them. I used the same concept for both our sauces. The tomatoes all went in whole, (no stems, no cores), and after burbling etc, I ran everything through the blender and then pushed it through a sieve to remove skins. End Rant.