Fire Roasted Marinara Sauce

 Fire roasting gives a slight smoky flavor to whatever you roast and so I thought it might be just the perfect way to start my marinara.  This sauce is made from tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and a few peppers, freshly plucked from the garden.

Some people call it spaghetti sauce, or Italian tomato sauce, but marinara has a nice ring to my ear.  One theory suggests the sauce was invented by the Spanish in the mid 16th century.  Because of the high acid content of tomatoes, the sauce was resistant to spoilage, making it ideal for lengthy sea voyages and thus sprang the name marinara.  Whatever the name, fire roasting does add an additional element of flavor to the tomato.

Fire Roasting

Two more helpful reasons to fire roast are the removal of additional moisture, and if you want to remove the skins, they can be picked up in your fingers and tossed aside - no need to blanch and skin.

To get started, I took about 10 pounds of San Marzano tomatoes from the garden.  I washed them, cored them, sliced them in half lengthwise and removed the seeds.  I took a couple of onions and sliced them into ½ inch slices, and I cored and sliced lengthwise a couple of peppers.

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

Fire Roasted Marinara

10# fresh Italian paste tomatoes like San Marzano’s
2 large onions
4-6 cloves garlic minced
2-4 green peppers
2-3 Tablespoons fresh minced basil (1 TBS dried)
2 Tablespoons minced oregano (1 TBS dried)
1/2 cup olive oil - divided
3-4 teaspoons salt (or to taste)
1-2 Tbs sugar (optional or to taste)

Fire Roasted Peppers and Onions

Bring your grill to about 350 degrees with medium heat.  Put 1/2 the olive oil in a dish and brush the inside of the tomato with olive oil and place on the grill cut side down.  Quickly fill the grill with tomatoes and close the lid.  The temperature will have dropped to 200 degrees or below.  Wait until the temperature rises to 350 again.  Quickly open the grill and brush the top side of the tomatoes with olive oil and then check the first tomatoes that you put on.  They should have grill marks on them.  Using a spatula, quickly flip them over and close the lid again, waiting for the temperature to get back up over 350 degrees. 

Have a rimmed pan or bowl to put the roasted tomatoes into as juice will continue to run out after you take them off.  Remove the roasted tomatoes from the grill to the rimmed pan and let them cool.  Roast the other vegetables in the same way, brushing them with olive oil and leaving them on the grill to show a little black char marks, but not totally blackened.

Once the tomatoes are cool, you can use your hands to pluck the skins from the tomatoes if you wish, or you can just leave them on as they will be chopped up in the next step.

Add the chopped garlic and herbs to the sauce.

Drain off the liquid from the roasted tomatoes and reserve this liquid. Put the tomatoes into a food processor and pulse to chop finely.  Add the processed tomatoes to a large stock pot with the other 1/2 of the olive oil. Process all of the rest of the ingredients roasted and not and add them to the stock pot.

Thick sauce ready to be cooked

Simmer the sauce for 60-90 minutes stirring frequently. It will be thick and you will need to watch so that it does not burn.  Add the salt, pepper, sugar, and the juice that you reserved from the roasted tomatoes to suit your taste and thickness.

 





You should end up with about 6 pints (12 cups) of sauce.  You can place that into hot pint jars, seal them and put them in a boiling water bath for 35 minutes or you can cool the sauce and then put it into freezer bags in portions for future use.  Just like the pesto recipe that I gave you last month, there is no end to the uses you will have for this sauce, so make plenty!