Page 465 - YC Cooking School

Success with Sauces

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Tips for fresh, delicious fresh tomato sauce

A well-made, fresh tomato sauce is the bee’s knees. It’s easy to make, it freezes well and it’s
as versatile as it is delicious.

Start with the freshest and ripest tomatoes you can find
For this sauce, its important to use tomatoes that are beautifully ripe and full of flavour.
Cherry tomatoes make a great tomato sauce, though if you use these you’ll have to leave
the skins on. If you’re making this sauce in the middle of winter and struggling to find ripe
tomatoes, it’s perfectly acceptable to substitute the 1.5kg of fresh tomatoes with three 400g
tins of whole peeled tomatoes.

Choose your quantity
As a rough guideline, 1.5kg of fresh tomatoes will give you about one litre of lip-smacking
sauce.

Prepare the mirepoix
A mirepoix is a combination of chopped carrots, onions and celery that when fried off, adds
a beautiful depth of flavour to a dish. It’s used as a base for lots of dishes including stocks,
soups, gravies and sauces. Carrots and onions in particular can add a lot of natural
sweetness, so depending on how ripe and sweet they are, you may not need to add sugar to
the sauce.

Cut the vegetables carefully
Chopping vegetables is far easier if you use a sharp knife and a large chopping board. Try to
chop your ingredients as finely and as consistently as possible, so that they impart their

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