How To Make A Tomato Basil Sauce

I am going to show you how to make tomato sauce. Here, I have got 800 grams of plum tomatoes. These are good Italian plum tomatoes, whole ones, not chopped.

I have a sprig of basil, a stick of celery, 1 carrot cut in half and 1 onion just peeled and cut very simply into four. What I'm going to do, first of all, is use some olive oil, just 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a pot and I am going to fry the vegetables in this olive oil. So I'll put my carrots in.

These are really the flavoring ingredients. Just to make it a bit easier, rather than put the whole celery stick in, cut it into 4, and you can see I've left the root of the onion to keep it intact because what we are going to do is take these ingredients out later, once they have done their job. Got a good sprig of basil here, so that goes in, too, and a good Italian mamma style pinch of salt that will really bring out the flavor in the tomato sauce.

Here's some freshly ground black pepper that goes in, too. You can hear them frying away. So we'll give them about 5 minutes to really get the flavors out, then I'll put the tomatoes in.

I am just going to break up the tomatoes. You can either use a potato masher or just use your hands to break them up. So, these vegetables have had about 5 minutes frying now, they're starting to get brown, I can smell that beautiful smell of frying onions and I am just going to pour the tomatoes in now.

So it's as simple as that. And we just wait, just wait, occasionally giving it a little stir. But wait about 30 minutes and that flavor of the vegetables will come through into the tomatoes.

So this has been boiling away. This is our tomato sauce, it's being boiling for about 30-40 minutes now and it's really gone down in volume and now, I am going to take out the vegetables, remember that we put them there just for flavor. If you want to, you could blitz the entire thing in a food processor and that way, you could feed children vegetables without them knowing about it.

And I do like the flavor of it when it's blitzed. Just for now, I am going to do it without the vegetables. It's amazing how much flavor they will have given.

So once you've taken out all the last pieces of vegetables, there is your tomato sauce ready and done. So that's how to make tomato sauce. .