Test cooks (finally) harvesting a good crop
Simple but flavorful and easily adaptable to your tastes, this sauce made with fresh tomatoes should be on any chef’s basic sauce list. My personal variation: It called for discarding the garlic after browning it in oil that is used for the tomatoes, but I reserved the garlic until I tasted the recipe version, then added most of it back in to the final sauce. Of course, I also used more garlic than called for.
Mark Guydish | for Times Leader
Fresh tomatoes (from our garden), basil, garlic, olive oil,salt and pepper. Yes, this is simple.
Mark Guydish | for Times Leader
‘Tis tomato time, and for the first growing season since MT and I bought our house, we seem to have a prodigious bounty.
A little backstory regarding the “test kitchen” you’ve been reading about for more than five years, where MT and I do most of our cooking. When we started dating, MT’s great aunt Rosa Betzler lived in the house we occupy today. Still speaking with a strong German accent despite decades in America, Rosa invited me to an introductory meal in her home, wonderfully adorned with an array of antique furniture that included multiple clocks, all active with periodic chimes and a few “cuckoos.”
Rosa charmed completely, an ability I later learned she used for decades to her advantage.
A remarkable example of how immigrants added to America’s success, Rosa had a son who died too young and should have inherited the house we live in. Bob’s name was immortalized by Rosa when she donated a substantial sum to King’s College (although King’s was not his alma mater; he had studied engineering at Notre Dame.)
The local college named an outdoor athletic complex after Robert Betzler and he also is memorialized in a photo Rosa left in her (now our) kitchen. For MT, it’s a reminder of “Cousin Bob,” who taught her how to play chess when she was a kid and advised her to follow him into the engineering field. (Ha! My wife the writer says that was never going to happen.)
As for Rosa, she always amazed me. Even in her late 80s, she moved like a woman at least 30 years her junior. She maintained her house impeccably. And with her late husband, Herman, no longer around to tend the vegetable garden, she took care of that with vigor, too.
She passed in her early 90s, willing her home to MT’s sister, who sold it to us. We moved in February, 2003 and that summer I started reclaiming the vegetable garden Rosa had left fallow in her illness.
We planted various vegetables each year, but tomatoes were always the dominant effort. MT’s dad Bill could grow scores of the red wonders — from seed — just a few houses away, and my best efforts were pathetic by comparison. Even after he showed me his secrets, I generated comparatively puny tomato crops.
I seem to have finally done something right this year. Last week MT brought in seven ripe red “maters” from Rosa’s legacy garden in one day. I checked our copy of “The Essential Vegetarian Cookbook,” and quickly decided this pasta sauce was a great way to use them all in one try.
I followed the recipe exactly, up to the point it says to discard the garlic slices. I reserved them in a small bowl and finished the instructions as written.
I tasted the sauce and thought it was great, but decided to add the garlic back into the mix, using an immersion blender to both meld the garlic and break a few large tomato chunks down.
MT and I loved this, served on some homemade, whole wheat pasta. Even with the garlic, the fresh tomato flavor jumped out.
The beauty of this is how adaptable it is. Add salt and pepper to accentuate the fresh tomato flavor to taste. Discard the sauteed garlic or add it at the end as I did. Use fresh basil only or use dried basil early and add the fresh stuff later. Do garlic to suit you or not at all. The amount of fresh tomato taste is completely in your hands.
I like to think Bill, somewhere in an afterlife, sees that maybe I finally got tomato gardening right(ish). And I hope Rosa looks at our use of her property, and approves.
Dobru chut!
Simplest Fresh Tomato Sauce (The Essential Vegetarian Cookbook)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 large garlic clove, thinly sliced
1½ pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
2 tablespoons minced fresh basil, or 2 teaspoons crumbled dried basil
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper to taste.
Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium high heat. Add the garlic. Reduce heat to medium-low and swish the garlic through the oil until the slices begin to color, about 40 seconds. Remove garlic from the oil with a slotted spoon or spatula and discard them (I kept them and put them into the final sauce).
Swiftly pour the tomatoes into the hot oil. Add the dried basil if using and cook until tomatoes reduce to a thick sauce, about 10 minutes, though it depends on the tomatoes (I cooked at least 20 minutes). If using fresh basil, add after cooking the tomatoes to a sauce. Remove sauce from heat and season to taste with salt and pepper.
At this point you can adjust sauce thickness with an immersion blender or a food processor, but don’t overdo it. Fresh tomatoes can have a lot of liquid (ours did) and your sauce can end up too watery.
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