That is the EXACT reason, I don't even try to make sauce or catsup anymore....when you can buy 2 -16oz cans for a buck (store brand) or 3 for a dollar on sale....catsup 2 for dollar. I had much rather use my tomatos for for other things... such as Annies sasla, tomato and okra, juice, etc. and then you risk the chance of scorching it if you don't stir it and waste it all.....and then the cost of the jar , lid, ect .NOT worth it!!

If you put the freshly squeezed sauce in a strainer and let it drip for awhile you will get about half the water out which will reduce the boiling time.

If you put the sauce in a pressure cooker first and then put it in a strainer you will get a LOT of water out. It will be about the consistancy of ketchup or puree.

I use a stainless pressure cooker (not aluminum for cooking tomatoes). Bring it to 15 psi and then shut it off. It may work at lower temps/pressures but I haven't tried them yet. You can take it out of the cooker as soon as it reaches zero pressure. You don't have to worry about cooling the pressure cooker down too quickly. Then dump the sauce in the strainer and the water will run right out.

You may want to add a little water back as the sauce can get very thick.

Zeuspaul

If the sauce was cooked down for hours and is still not to your liking, try canning it as it is and cook it down further when you are preparing your pasta dinner. It should reduce to a thick sauce in 20 minutes or less. The secret to cooking down quickly is to use a pot or pan with a very large surface. The larger the surface, the quicker the evaporation. I use a 16 inch stainless steel fry pan.

Taking into account cost, time, and flavor of the result, I've found the best way of thickening is adding *enough* of a good quality tomato paste. I generally boil the fresh squeezed stuff until the foaming subsides, then whisk in Contadina brand tomato paste to the desired thickness. So there is still that fresh tomato 'zing', the tomato paste is, by itself, similarly acidic, and it balances the flavor pretty well.

There are tomato pastes that taste like Contadina, and there are tomato pastes that taste like sawdust and food coloring. Avoid generic at all costs. 20¢ more a can is worth the while.

I felt guilty, at first. But over the years, my "hunnert' percent homemade" soul has become calloused.

I think you could put your sauce in a slow cooker. I haven't tried this method but there are others on this list who've used a slow cooker with success.

As I have mentioned MANY times it the past, before they go into a food strainer, you cut them in halves and dig out most the liquid and seeds. This will give a thicker sauce. Some people place the watery sauce in a big baking pan and bake it in the oven to reduce down the water. Another option is to simply use a can or two of commercial tomato paste. Contadinea brand is very good. Also ading dried onions, peppers and garlic will soak up water too.

It is easy enough to pre-squeeze much of the watery juice out of the fruit before processing it in the mill and it is certainly worth trying. But we have discovered over the years that some of the flavor is lost as well. Nothing beats the taste intensity of slow, several hours, cooked sauce (not in a slow cooker unless you leave the lid off too as it won't cook down) especially if you are adding other flavoring ingredients to it.

As Shirley said - use a big diameter container to expose more surface area. And keep it on a low, slow boil. Patience and time are required as making sauce isn't supposed to be a "quickie".

That said, if the time involved doesn't appeal to you there are many ways to pre-drain off some of the water - stainless steel wire mesh colander, jelly bag, multiple layers of cheese cloth, you can even can it in quart jars as is as juice, let it sit and separate, pour off the water on the top, and viola' the rest is sauce that can be used as is or cooked down even more.

Dave

re: adding commercial paste.

I use "off" brands of paste, using Hunts or Contadina give the sauce too much of a store bought flavor.

Costco or Sams usually has deals on pastes that are not usually mainstream.

greenhouser,

I have two suggestions to add to what's been said.

One is that the kind of tomato makes a HUGE difference. If you plant meatier "paste" varieties, you'll get a thicker sauce a lot sooner. (You gotta balance that out with the flavour you like, of course!)

The other is a trick I learned from an old issue of Organic Gardening magazine, and that I find works for me. I put the tomatoes in a pot, skins and all, and cook them briefly, maybe 15 minutes, till they soften and exude a lot of juice but are still cohesive tomato blobs. At this stage I scoop out a lot of the tomato juice using a ladle. (I put it into a different pot and can it separately for drinking and using to make gazpacho!)

Once I've scooped out as much as I can, I put the tomatoes through a food mill to puree them and remove the skins and seeds. I find that they go through much more easily once they have been cooked a bit, and this way I get a thicker sauce sooner. (I usually can remove about 2 or 3 pints of juice from an 8- or 9-pint cannerload batch, which I figure means my sauce is 25 to 30% or so thicker when I staart cooking it down than it otherwise would be.)

Don't know if this helps, but it's worked for me.

Oh, one more thing. Because I grow a lot of kinds of tomatoes, and also sometimes have more patience than others, I end up canning sauces of different thicknesses, an I find that works fine since I use them for different purposes. Sometimes I label them ("extra thick" or "quite runny" or whatever) but mostly I just pick 'em up and gauge what's inside when I am looking to use some. For soup or stew, a runny one is fine. For pizza, I look for a nice, thick one. (This doesn't really help with what you actually asked, I realize. Some people want their sauce to always be really thick. But it helps for me!)

Good luck,

Zabby

You can put the tomato sauce in the refrigerator for a day and some of the water will separate to the bottom of the pot. This works better when the sauce has been cooked a while. You can then siphon it from the bottom with some plastic tubing or baster. It will not be thick enough but it's that much you don't have to cook out. Also I have cooked it down outside on a propane turkey fryer, stainless steel pot only, so as not to heat up the house.

I had an Italian neighbor who would cut up the tomatoes and let them just drain overnight in a colander, then made her sauces. Since she canned many, many jars of tomato sauce I figured she knew what she was doing. I've followed her instructions and had very nice sauces to can.

fedup321: That's what one of my friends said! A qt can of tomato sauce at Wal*Mart is only .88 now. About $1.20 in a glass jar. She can't believe we go through this time and expense to make sauce. The tomato juice goes fast but the sauce takes a lot of energy and time to cook down... then add the cost of canning it! =O

No one here eats salsa. So it's juice or sauce but this cooking it down for hours is the pits.

zeuspaul: I can try cooking them first but I don't have a pressure cooker. My Presto canner is aluminum so it out. I can try cooking them in the large SS stock pot, then draining them down in the colander. The watery part can be canned for juice and the meat used for sauce. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. :)

To everyone else: Thank you for all the helpful replies. I read every reply and will try either draining them after cooking them awhile, or scooping out as much of the juice as possible before running them through the Roma-Mill. The juice drained will be canned for tomato juice and not wasted. The skins and seeds will go into the compost pile for recycling. Sounds like the problem is solved. :)

Try tossing in a batch of freeze dried mushrooms. Those puppies suck-up water out of the pot. You can find them at Costco, and other retail stores. Other freeze dried veggies would work too. This trick made a big difference - cut out about an hour of boiling-down time!

why does tomato sauce have no thickening agent