How to Make Homemade Tomato Sauce

This mother sauce is a rich and delicious tomato sauce. This is a similar sauce for what you might use on pizza, but this recipe is a little more complicated and has a few extra steps and ingredients. Do not fear, though! It is still a recipe that is easy to make with the help of this guide.

Ingredients Needed:

  • Veal cooking stock
  • Mirepoix (this time use 4 ounces leeks, 2 ounces celery, 2 ounces carrots)
  • 2 oz. butter
  • Garlic bay leaves
  • Fresh thyme
  • Veal or ham bone
  • Salted pork chunks
  • Crushed ripened tomatoes

Start out by placing your salted pork chunks to a large sauce pan with a little bit of oil on the bottom. Add the bone of your choice and let it start to cook away for about 5 minutes.

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Let the meat cook for a while, then add the mirepoix (the leeks, celery, and carrots) and butter to the sauce pan. Let that sauté.

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Add bay leaf and thyme.

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Add the cooking stock and tomatoes to the sauce pan. Let the mixture simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

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Remove the bone and bay leaves. A pinch or sugar, salt, and pepper can be added according to your own preferences.

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Homemade Tomato Sauce

This mother sauce is a rich and delicious tomato sauce. This is a similar sauce for what you might use on pizza, but this recipe is a little more complicated and has a few extra steps and ingredients. Do not fear, though! It is still a recipe that is easy to make with the help of this guide.

Ingredients

  • Veal cooking stock
  • Mirepoix this time use 4 ounces leeks, 2 ounces celery, 2 ounces carrots
  • 2 oz. butter
  • Garlic bay leaves
  • Fresh thyme
  • Veal or ham bone
  • Salted pork chunks
  • Crushed ripened tomatoes

Instructions

  • Start out by placing your salted pork chunks to a large sauce pan with a little bit of oil on the bottom. Add the bone of your choice and let it start to cook away for about 5 minutes.
  • Let the meat cook for a while, then add the mirepoix (the leeks, celery, and carrots) and butter to the sauce pan. Let that sauté.
  • Add bay leaf and thyme.
  • Add the cooking stock and tomatoes to the sauce pan. Let the mixture simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
  • Remove the bone and bay leaves. A pinch or sugar, salt, and pepper can be added according to your own preferences.

This version of the French mother tomato sauce isn’t vegetarian, but it is easy to substitute ingredients to make it so! All you have to do is not include the meat and bone to the beginning of the recipe. Also, instead of using a meat cooking stock, all you need to do is use a vegetable cooking stock instead.

This recipe is great to put over chicken with mozzarella cheese. You can also use it in pastas.

Tomato Sauce Facts:

  • French tomato sauce uses little garlic and no oregano or basil, unlike the Italian tomato sauce.
  • The first time tomato sauce was used with pasta in a recipe book was in 1790.

Here are links to the other mother sauce recipes:

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Tomato Sauce Video Instructions

Check out this video to know all the details in making your own classical French cuisine tomato sauce!


Start Video Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Rada’s Test Kitchen. My name’s Blake and today we’re going to be continuing with our mother sauce series. Tomato sauce is our last one. As for our ingredients, we have a veal stock, a mire paux (I used leeks instead of regular onion), garlic bay leaves, fresh thyme, a veal bone or a ham bone, salted pork chunks, and some crushed ripened tomatoes. We’ll go ahead and start off by cooking the mire paux in our pan.

We’ll take our salted pork and render the fat out. What I did is put a little corn oil on the bottom. That helps break up the bacon because it can get a little sticky and stick together. It takes a little longer to cook. We’ll go ahead and get that bone in there and let that cook away a little. Bayleaf. Try to keep those vegetables off the side of the pan there. You don’t have to use leeks, you can use white onions, whatever. Scallions if you’d like. We have some garlic in there. Continue to let that cook. This smells incredible. I’m going to go ahead and take some of this thyme and put a couple pieces in there. You can always pull it out or you can just strip those leaves off by putting it down. That way you don’t have to go fishing for the twigs.

Now we have our vegetables cooked down nice, I’m going to add our stock. We can let this simmer down. We’ll add our tomato product as well. We’ll let them boil together. This tomato sauce is not vegetarian but you could make it vegetarian by omitting the bone and making a vegetable stock or water for that matter. I recommend the vegetable stock if you do. Once you add the tomatoes and the sauce, you’re going to want to let this simmer and reduce a little. Take the bone out. You can keep it if you want, add it into the sauce. We’re going to want to track down the bayleaf and take that out. There’s our sauce.

Like I said, you can go vegetarian and use a vegetable stock or get that meaty flavor by using pork stock. You can use whatever stock you’d like though. This is our last stock of the series. You can put it over some chicken and add some mozzarella. You can put it over pasta, you could braise meats with it or do fresh mussels. You add a little red pepper flake, throw it in a sauté pan, add mussels. They’ll pop open and that’s my favorite way to do it. Give it a shot, let us know how you like it in the comment box below. Thanks for watching.

End of Video Transcript