Sam and I took a drive into Boston to get more shelves for our pantry. From the before picture on the left, we needed more shelves to hold canned foods. The cardboard boxes on the bottom shelf were holding all of the jars. I did some measuring and found we could fit a whole second shelving unit above our freezer. So we came back with some additional shelves for the left unit, and the new right unit. We also made more space for Sam’s baking fungibles, and for the cat and dog food.
None of my canning cookbooks or guides had a recipe for onion jam, so I turned to the internet.
Fortunately for me, I found this recipe from Serious Eats for Onion Confiturra. A confiturra (or confitura) is the Spanish or Portuguese word for a “preserve” or “conserve.” It seemed like a tasty recipe, so I figure I could bank some onions on it. I found sweet onions at the farmer’s market for a reasonable price and herbs were in abundance this week.
Woah Nelly! Did this smell GOOD when it was cooking. Onions and rosemary! Yes, Please!
And the taste? Fantastic. Not too sweet, not too sour. It has wonderful umami flavors and just a little bit of carmelized onion taste. The texture is very soft, with noticeable pieces of onion. 4 pounds of onions made 3 cups of jam.
Some ideas of what to do with this magic sauce?
You get the point…
I get the heirloom tomato craze. Heirloom tomato plants are hardy and disease-resistant, and the fruits are colorful and flavorful.
However, there’s something to be said for boring-old red tomatoes. I mean… look at how WEIRD the heirlooms look when you can them!
(Heirlooms on the left. “Standard” tomatoes on the right.)
I make boring tomato sauce. By “boring” I mean “plain.” I don’t jazz it up with too many spices, or add chunks of tomato, mushroom, red pepper… It’s basically reduced tomato puree with some minimal seasoning. There’s a reason for making boring sauce. Interesting tomato sauce – with mushrooms, meat, vodka, roasted red peppers, fresh basil, etc… is only useful as tomato sauce… you put it on pasta. You make lasagna! Voila! But boring tomato sauce is infinitely versatile. I can add cumin, oregano, vinegar and sriracha and turn out a decent enchilada sauce. Add stock and it becomes a tomato soup base. Reduced with vinegar, ketchup, and mustard and it becomes barbecue sauce. Tonight, we combined the sauce remaining after filling the jars with sausage, shrimp and rice and had jambalaya. I can still add mushrooms or roasted red peppers and dump it on pasta… Boring tomato sauce is like the pluripotent stem cell of the tomato world. (Well, technically the tomato is the pluripotent stem cell of the tomato world, but… the metaphor isn’t great… so sue me.)
Pureeing tomatoes is a fun process with the food mill attachment to the Kitchenaid Stand Mixer. I estimate that I pureed 20 lbs of tomatoes into about 14 to 15 quarts of tomato puree.
Clockwise from the top is 1/2 cup chopped fresh basil, 3 onions chopped and 5 cloves of garlic through the press and sautéed until soft, and 1/4 cup dried oregano. Not shown is brown sugar, salt and pepper.
We started the sauce about 8pm on Saturday, and cooked it overnight in the oven. Then, in the morning, it went back on the stovetop to cook through until about 3pm. Typically, we would have cooked the sauce overnight and seen a reduction of about 50% and canned it first thing in the morning. However, it’s REALLY damn humid here, so there was no place for the moisture to go… It took a really long time to reduce.
I had enough tomatoes to make 7 quarts of tomato sauce, along with another 11 quarts of quartered tomatoes in their own juice. Those little jars are the onion jam that I’ll describe in a later post.
Yesterday while I was at work, Addi the core author of this blog and my wife, went a little crazy and bought 50 lbs of tomatoes. She stopped by my shop to pick up our dog and say “hi honey! Guess what you get to do on your two day weekend?”
So, this weekend it’s jamming tomatoes in jars two ways. As you will see in the next post we also are doing basic tomato and basil sauce.
I’ve been threatened with pesto and onion jam as well.
The photo you see is six jars of standard red tomatoes and two jars of heirloom varietals we received in our weekly CSA share. TOMATO CONFETTI!
ReLocavore: Redefining "local" 