Jottage from Lancaster - Roasted Tomato Sauce

According to Hugh, this seems to be one of those things you should always have in the fridge or freezer and I have made tomato sauce before using real tomatoes but it was rather watery and not very nice. Roasting the tomatoes first seemed to give more hope of some denser flavour. 

I had always been a bit put off making this on the grounds that we don't grow our own tomatoes and so I would have to buy a lot. But the market stall in Lancaster this morning had a tempting offer - big bags of tomatoes that were cheap. I didn't expect them to be nice salad tomatoes but bought a couple of bags and even before fully unpacking the shopping, I had them halved, sprinkled with garlic and thyme, slathered with rapeseed oil and in the oven, roasting. The cooking smell in the kitchen is mouth-watering and I have just taken them out to cool before sieving them to get rid of the skin.

So now they are cooked and I have completed the rather tedious task of squashing them through a sieve with a wooden spoon.

Tomatoes before...

...and after.

The sauce turned out to be quite nice - but a pale orange-y colour and the taste wasn't amazing. I guess that good, robust English tomatoes would produce an entirely different flavour and colour and using what are probably rejected tomatoes from some rather unpleasant polytunnel in a derelict area of southern Europe just doesn't work the same. But not to be deterred I poured it all into a moussaka instead of tomatoes in a tin and it did give a depth of flavour that wasn't usually there. 

It was easy to make and I would definitely do so again - but using cheap out-of-season tomatoes makes even that minimal effort, not really worth it.