Have you ever wondered how a restaurant’s spaghetti sauce tastes so much better than yours? Well the first reason is because you didn’t have to cook it. Everything tastes better when someone else is in the kitchen. But seriously, how do they get their sauce to taste so delicious?

One of the key ingredients is time. The chef starts it first thing in the morning. It simmers. They stir it. It simmers. They stir it. It simmers. Okay, you get the idea and by dinner service, bam boom! It’s done.

Tomato sauce is one of the 5 Mother Sauces. Old school, it consisted of Roma tomatoes that have been blanched and peeled. I like to get really engrossed with my recipes, so I prefer to squish (technical term for taking the tomato in your hand and squeezing it to get all the juices out and shred the flesh). Add some vegetables, stock, salt and herbs and spices and simmer and stir all day. The sauce is then pureed with an emersion blender until you have a smooth consistency and a thick sauce.

But let’s go back to the blanching and peeling of the tomatoes for a minute. Have you ever done it? It is EXTREMELY time consuming! First you take this little tool called a “shark”. It consisted of a handle and a small round metal head with teeth all around it. You take it and scoop out the top of the tomato where the stem was. Discard it. Then you flip the tomato over and with a very sharp paring knife, you make an “X” cut on the bottom of the tomato. But not too deep! Repeat this a gazillion times until all your tomatoes are done. Hopefully you remembered to turn the burner on under your giant pot of water and it has come to a boil. If it hasn’t boiled yet, don’t watch it! It will never boil.

Go get a giant bowl of cold water ready and throw a ton of ice cubes in it.

So your water has come to a boil. Dump your tomatoes in but no more than 12 at a time. It will take only about 30-60 sec for you to see the skins start to peel back. Remove the tomatoes immediately and transfer them to the ice bath and let them chill for about a min. Do this until all of your tomatoes have made it through the jacuzzi and ice bath.

Remember that paring knife you used earlier? Well go find it. You’re going to use it again to peel the skin off all the tomatoes you just blanched. This is when I would phone a friend and challenge them to see who can peel the fastest or who can take the biggest piece off in one sheet. On second thought, maybe not. We need our friends to like us.

This is why, and I really hate to say it, but restaurants go for the giant cans of already peeled tomatoes. There, I said it. The secret is out. But let’s be realistic here. Do you know how much it would cost for your slice of lasagna when you factor in the high cost of tomatoes nowadays, the labor cost to prep, blanch and peel all those tomatoes and the fuel of the stove to boil the water? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay the same amount for a ribeye that I do for a slice of vegetable lasagna.

It would be the same at home too. I would rather add vegetables, herbs and spices, to an already decent spaghetti sauce. If I’m going to buy canned and peeled whole tomatoes and spend the time making my own sauce, I’m going to make a ton of it and can it. But that’s just me.

There is a time and place to blanch those beautiful Roma tomatoes. You’ll use this knowledge when you need to “concasse” (blanched, seeded and diced) a couple of tomatoes for Mussels Mariner. But that’s a recipe for next time…..

Eat Well!