Story: This is a recipe from an ex-girlfriend of mine who's family was Italian. I love Italian food, and this is a fantastic simple tomato sauce.
Years you've been making it: Since 2007
Author / Creator: Jessica Nackel
Submitted by: Dustin
Ingredients:
2 - 28 oz can whole tomatoes
4-8 Sausages (mild or spicy)
2-4 Tablespoons tomato paste
5 Bay leaves
Basil (2-4 tablespoons chopped)
1 Finely chopped onion
Garlic (3-6 cloves)
1-2 Carrots, peeled
Salt/Pepper
Directions:
1) First prepare the tomatoes, this can get messy! On each tomato, pull the hard stem base out on the top of the tomato and clean out the seeds. After they are cleaned, in a large bowl, squeeze all the tomatoes until they are in small pieces. Put tomatoes aside.
2) Brown sausages. They do not need to be cooked through, just until they browned on the outside. Take them out of the pan and put aside.
3) In the same pan cook onion on med. heat for a couple minutes, turn heat down to low and add garlic for another minute.
4) In large non-stick pot add prepared tomatoes, sausages, bay leaves and garlic and onion. Cut carrots in half and add in pot.
5) Bring to a boil and reduce heat to very low. Cook for 6-10 hours, stirring every 10-20 minutes. The
longer you can cook it the better! (we did try this in the crock pot and stirred it every hour or so, but the crock pot retains most of the liquid, so you may want to boil it for 30 mins or so at the end to thicken the sauce up, or remove the top of the crock pot for the last hour or so)
6) Add the tomato paste half-way through. Add the basil with 30 minutes left. Add salt and pepper at the end.
7) Remove carrots and bay leaves before eating.
8) Enjoy!!
Notes:
This is one of those dishes that gets better the longer it is on the stove, that's why it calls for very low heat for 6-10 hours. This is because it reduces over time and really concentrates the tomato sugars and flavors. As mentioned above, we tried in the crock pot and it really didn't work well. Also, note that the carrots are added whole and then removed at the end, this is to extract the sugars from the carrots, but not actually add carrots to the sauce.
