Every spring, I plant my garden thinking that one tomato plant isn’t enough. Every fall, I realize that one tomato plant really is enough because I’m inundated with way too many gorgeous garden tomatoes, that all the fresh salsas and BLTs in the world couldn’t possibly use up. The year I started gardening, I panic-Googled how to use the buckets of tomatoes sitting on my counter, and I was intrigued to learn that I could make my own tomato paste (sidenote: did everyone already know this and I’m late to the game?!) I couldn’t believe how easy it was, and I also loved that I could freeze it, rather than trying to can it all and fear death-by-wrongly-preserved-tomatoes. Because yes, if you Google everything that can go wrong with canning, you will simply never can another thing as long as you live.

If you are swimming in tomatoes right now, give this recipe a try…and bask in the deliciousness that is homemade tomato paste…because not only does it sound fancier than salsa, but it’s just so darn delicious!

Recipe

The Easiest Tomato Paste

Ingredients

5lbs roma or plum tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp bottled lemon juice

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 F.
Cut all your tomatoes into quarters. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the tomatoes, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the skins start to separate from the tomatoes.
Working in batches, add the peeling tomatoes to a strainer over a large bowl. Using a large spoon or a potato masher, press the juice and pulp of the tomato through the strainer. Be patient. It might take a little while. Discard the peels and seeds remaining in the strainer and repeat with the remaining tomatoes.
Pour the contents of the bowl onto two large rimmed cookie sheets. Cook for 3 hours, carefully scraping the paste to the centre of the cookie sheets every 30 minutes or so. In the last hour, combine the contents of both cookie sheets to one.
Once the mixture is a thick paste, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool. At this point you can separate it into ice cube trays and freeze it, or store in a jar in the fridge covered by a thin layer of olive oil.