Making our own tomato sauce

by Kusma Gongba

Edited by Shaswat Badal

On February 1 we made our own tomato sauce. The day before, I and Pallav sir had gone and bought 5 kilograms or about 10 pounds of really fresh red and ripe tomato. We paid Rs. 170 for the lot.

The next day, we washed the tomatoes. Nitya, Utu, Sushmita, Abin, Pukar, Kushma, Vidheha as well as myself were involved. Sabita, Bhagwati maam and Pallav sir helped us. After washing the tomatoes, we checked if it was going bad. We removed the tomatoes that had marks, those that were slightly green or off color. Then I and Sabita maam cut the tomatoes into halves.

We then squeezed the tomato and everybody got a chance to help Sabita didi. After squeezing all the tomato, we had a lot of juice with seeds mixed in it. We helped filter the seeds and separated them so we could plant them once they were dry. As for the juice, it was really beautiful red. Pallav sir asked if we wanted to drink it but most of us only tasted it and since he has high blood sugar levels he thought it would be better to keep it to drink later. The juice was very sour and tasty.

Now that we were finished with the seeds and the juice, we went back to the tomatoes. We cooked the tomato for 25 minutes and let it cool down. After that, when we squeezed the tomato by hand and removed the pulp from the skin and other stuff that had not cooked enough to be soft. We set the tomato to heat again and again let it cool and squeezed what we could out of the mixture. Sadly, it was not much.

Now the skin and the remains were cooked Sabita maam and we got together and peeled garlic and hot green chilies and added salt and cooked the mixture and turned it into pickle! I just love tomato pickle like that. It is so sour and salty and hot. I was quite happy that we got seeds, juice, tomato pickle also out of the tomato that we had bought.

Taking the tomato puree, there was about 2 liters of it, we heated it and heated it for quite some while until we had a wonderful wonderful red mixture. Then we opened a manufactured sauce that we had bought from Bhatbhateni Supermarket made by Druk company and Rosa company. Druk is very popular in Nepal and the sauce is very sour and sweet and salty while Rosa sauce is also sweet but not so sour.

Our puree was quite bland to taste, no color, no preservatives, no additives. We started adding a bit of sugar, a bit of salt, a bit of vinegar to work on the taste. Over the next 45 minutes, we added 15 spoons of sugar, 150 ml of vinegar, a spoon of salt and heated and heated the mixture until the taste of Rosa and then Druk was close. While Rosa tomato sauce had a little vinegar, we really liked the taste of Druk brand so by the time we finished, what we had made was close to the Druk tomato sauce.

We had a lot of fun tasting and tasting and tasting the sauce that we were making. When we reached a consistency that the tomato sauce and water would not separate when moved to a plate, we let the mixture cool down. We had a wonderful tomato sauce, this was so much fun. Now I know how to make cookies of many types, homemade brown bread, Nepali achar pickle, rasbhari sweet, pizza, momos, hotdog, sandwiches, marmalade and litchi, plum, apricot jam.

The next day also it was tasting time, that was so much fun! We stood in line and a big spoon on sauce was put into our mouth. Pallav sir said that we would be working more on thickening using home-made potato starch! He said it is quite easy to make potato starch and we will be making it and then making our sauce also thick and dollopy.

I love all these projects that we do at school. Now I have to go check the rasbhari we are making with 10 packets of milk and then plan for the brown bread we are making tomorrow. I do not know where we put the yeast. You also have fun with cooking. It is really enjoyable.