This oven roasted tomato sauce brings out the very best flavor of your summer homegrown tomatoes! Just 5 ingredients and an hour of roasting time!

Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce

In August, we traveled to visit family in Puerto Rico. We were gone for two weeks (which was an amazing trip to tell of another time)….during peek tomato season! When we returned home we found our plants literally straining under the weight of more than 16 pounds of tomatoes! SIXTEEN! What’s a pasta loving family to do with 16 pounds of garden grown tomatoes? Make oven roasted tomato sauce, of course! I wish I could say I’ve stockpiled jars and jars of it in the freezer, but it’s so yummy that we have eaten almost all of it on the spot! I’m hoping to eek out one more batch of it before the temps dip.

Homegrown Tomatoes

There are a lot of jokes and memes shared about the true cost of homegrown tomatoes. The tomato starts. The green house structure to protect them from the spring time chill. The water to keep them growing during the summer time drought. The time invested in caging them, tying them up, trellising them, trimming them, and harvesting them. But the taste of a homegrown tomato from the backyard is truly priceless. They are so sweet they sometimes make my teeth hurt, and yet, I can’t get enough. They’re just so, so good.

Cozy Comfort Food

And at the end of all that, after all that work in the garden, comes the pay off. Buckets and buckets of homegrown tomatoes. We eat just as many straight off the vine as we manage to bring into the kitchen. But the ones that do make it to the kitchen are turned into oven roasted tomato sauce. It’s so simple, yet total perfection. We spoon it over our favorite pasta for a decadent feeling meal. And we discovered this summer that it’s the perfect sauce for Irving’s homemade pizza dough. We joke that someday we will open a restaurant and all we will serve is Irving’s pizza with my sauce. We’re a real power couple like that.

What kind of tomatoes should you use for roasted tomato sauce?

We use a bit of a mish mash when it comes to our tomatoes. Our favorite tomatoes to grow are Sun Gold—they are perfectly sweet and delicious and yield a lot of tomatoes! This year we also tried growing Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes which were really great for slicing and eating fresh, in salads, and in sandwiches. For sauce I simply gather up anything that is ripe, almost ripe, or a little too ripe and throw them all into the pot! The smaller “cherry tomatoes” are so easy because you only need to remove the stem to prepare them. I chop the larger tomatoes into large chunks. If I am using store bought tomatoes that aren’t quite so ripe I generally discard the seeds and liquids, but find that they’re not a problem with homegrown tomatoes. The bottom line is that any tomato will be fine, but the more delicate homegrown or farmer’s market tomatoes are the tastiest!

To sweeten or not to sweeten?

Many tomato sauce recipes call for a pinch of sugar to balance out the acidity of the tomatoes. When I am using my homegrown tomatoes I omit the sugar because the tomatoes are naturally so sweet. One of our favorite varieties are the Sun Gold, and they are sweet like candy off the vine. Store bought tomatoes that may have been picked before they were fully ripe sometimes need a little extra sweetness—taste and see!

More Pasta Dishes You Will Love!

More dishes to make with garden grown tomatoes!

Let’s Make Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce

You’re an hour away from absolutely decadent, perfect, oven roasted tomato sauce. Let’s do this!

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