Tomato paste is one of the most popular products in the kitchen. You can’t cook delicious borscht, flavorful cabbage rolls, and various sauces for poultry, meat, and fish without it.
The simplest thing is to go to the store and buy the product there. But homemade tomato paste is much tastier and healthier than its industrial counterpart. When I take a jar from a store shelf, I am always confused by the number of additives on the label that begin with the letter E. I don’t even want to figure out what they mean, one thing is clear - it is not safe for health.
Therefore, I suggest making your own tomato paste. If you have a good harvest of tomatoes this year, you can make very tasty tomatoes in gelatin from small fruits. The rest will be processed to make bright, tasty and aromatic pasta. You can add pureed apples or plums to it and get tomato sauce with a new taste and aroma.
How to properly prepare tomato paste at home from tomatoes
This method of cooking tomato paste is the most common. Despite the fact that the vegetable mass has to be boiled for a long time, you will be pleased with the result. The tomato paste is almost the same thickness as store-bought, has a very beautiful bright color and amazing taste.
Ingredients:
- 3 kg - tomatoes
- 100 g - granulated sugar
- 100 ml - vinegar 9%
- salt - to taste
- Cut the tomatoes into arbitrary pieces, cutting out the hard core. Place in a cooking pot and place on the stove. Bring to a boil and cook the tomatoes for 10-15 minutes until they give a lot of juice and become soft.
- Place the mixture on a metal sieve and rub with a spoon so that the seeds and skins remain. You can throw away the pulp, and put the tomato mass back on the stove.
- After boiling, reduce the heat and simmer the mixture to the desired thickness for 3-4 hours.
Cooking time directly depends on the consistency you want to achieve.
To prevent the paste from burning on the bottom, you need to stir it periodically.
- 5-7 minutes before completion, add salt, sugar and vinegar. Mix thoroughly and pack into sterile jars up to the neck. Then we roll it up and leave it to cool, wrapped warmly so as not to disturb the natural sterilization processes.
Store the finished preserves in a cool place where the rest of the preparations are located.
Lecho with pepper, carrots, onions and tomato paste
Ingredients:
- bell pepper – 1 kg;
- carrots – 0.4 kg;
- onions – 0.3 kg;
- garlic – 5 cloves;
- tomato paste – 0.5 kg;
- water – 0.7 l;
- salt – 50 g;
- sugar – 100 g;
- vegetable oil – 120 ml;
- 9% vinegar – 50 ml.
Cooking method
- Prepare sterile jars with lids.
- Wash the pepper, cut in half, remove seeds and stalks. Cut into large strips.
- Peel and wash the carrots. Grate on a coarse grater.
- Peel the onion, rinse, cut into half rings. Peel the garlic, wash it, chop it.
- Pour oil into a cauldron or thick-walled pan and heat it. Lower the onion and stir. Heat without frying for 5 minutes.
- Add carrots and stir. Simmer with onions for 10 minutes.
- Add pepper and garlic.
- In a separate bowl, mix tomato paste with hot water, sugar and salt. Pour this sauce over the vegetables. Simmer everything together over low heat for 40 minutes. 5 minutes before readiness, pour in vinegar.
- When hot, place the lecho into jars. Seal tightly. Turn them over, wrap them in a blanket, and cool.
Thick tomato paste for the winter “You'll lick your fingers”
This recipe makes the paste thick and much healthier than the one sold in the store. It turns out to be a wonderfully rich color and the cooking method is very simple.
Ingredients:
3.5 kg - fresh tomatoes
If you do not have your own tomatoes, but store-bought ones, the cream variety is very suitable for harvesting. They are not so watery and have a fleshy flesh.
- Wash the tomatoes, remove the center, cut into slices, and place in a pan.
- Let's put it on the stove. Bring to a boil and cook for 15-20 minutes.
- When the tomatoes are boiled and the skin begins to fall off the pulp, remove the pan from the stove and grind through a metal sieve.
- Put the remaining puree back on the fire and boil until it reaches the required thickness.
To prevent the tomato mass from burning at the bottom, stir it regularly.
- This is what tomato paste looks like after 2 hours of boiling.
- Pack the hot mixture into sterilized jars and seal with boiled lids. Then we turn the preservation over and leave it to cool under a warm cloth. The output was 800 ml of thick tomato paste. You can store the workpiece in a cool place.
You can use homemade pasta in any way you like - season the borscht and serve it with pasta. And if you add garlic and cilantro to it, you get a spicy sauce and an excellent dressing for meat.
Bell pepper lecho with zucchini
But such lecho can really successfully replace a side dish with meat. Because in fact, what you will end up with is not a lecho, but a vegetable stew made from foods rich in soluble and insoluble fiber, which will have a beneficial effect on digestion in the short term and on your figure in the long term. In this case, the zucchini will be the main component of the dish.
Ingredients:
- Zucchini – 1.5kg
- Bell pepper – 3 pcs (300g)
- Tomatoes - 1kg or 500ml tomato paste
- Carrots – 3 pcs (250g)
- Onions - 3 pcs
- Sunflower oil – 150ml
- Vinegar 9% - 3 tbsp
- Sugar - 2 tbsp
- Salt - 1 tbsp
- One hot pepper for the most avid lovers
Preparation:
- First of all, let's prepare the zucchini. A well-ripened fruit is quite suitable for treatment. Peel it, cut it lengthwise and remove all the seeds. Then cut it into small cubes.
- Then prepare the bell pepper. We remove the stalk, cut it, remove the seeds and partitions and cut into cubes or strips.
- Then finely chop the onion and grate the carrots.
- The difference between this recipe and the previous ones is that before you cook the lecho, you need to first fry the zucchini. Therefore, you need to use a thick-walled pan as a cooking container. And ideally - a cauldron.
- We put it on medium heat, pour sunflower oil into it and add the zucchini. Next we send carrots and onions.
- Fry the mixture for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- After 40 minutes, pour into the pan tomato paste prepared in a blender, or store-bought from a jar, diluted in half a liter of boiled water. And then add the bell pepper.
- At the same time, add sugar and salt and mix everything thoroughly. After this, leave the mixture to simmer for 15-20 minutes.
- 5 minutes before the end of cooking, add vinegar to the lecho. Let it boil one last time and remove from heat.
- After this, put the still hot mass into pre-sterilized jars and close with boiled lids.
- Next, we perform the usual actions, turn the jars over to make sure they are sealed, cover them with a towel and leave them like that until they cool. After which they can be sent to a dark and cool storage place.
The most delicious tomato and pepper paste recipe
Adding sweet bell pepper will not only add its own unique flavor, but also enrich the paste with vitamins. For the preparation, it is better to take red pods to get a beautiful and rich color.
Ingredients:
- 7 kg - tomatoes
- 6 pcs. - sweet bell pepper
- 1 tbsp. l. - salt
- Wash the vegetables and cut them into small pieces (remove the seeds and tails from the peppers).
- Grind the prepared tomatoes and peppers through a meat grinder.
- Pour the vegetable puree into a deep bowl. I didn’t have one, so I had to pour it into two pans.
- Bring the mixture over high heat until it boils. Then we place a metal sieve on top and begin to collect excess liquid with a ladle.
By this action we will reduce the time of boiling the paste and it will quickly reach the desired thickness.
- I collected 4 liters of surplus in 40 minutes.
I advise you not to pour out the collected broth, but use it as a vegetable broth in soups or use it as a filling for other preservation.
Combine the remaining puree in one pan and use a blender to make the mass more homogeneous.
- Then reduce the heat to low and simmer the pasta for another 15 minutes, stirring all the time. Then we pour it hot into sterile jars and roll up the boiled lids with a special machine. Turn the twists upside down and leave them to cool in a warm place.
- I had free space in the freezer, so when it had cooled completely, I distributed some of the tomato paste into small portion bags (3 tablespoons included).
They are very convenient to use later when preparing a wide variety of dishes - borscht, sauces, dressings for casseroles, etc.
Lecho with tomato paste and carrots
The delicacy with tomato paste and carrots has a richer taste due to the addition of a number of ingredients to the recipe. Preparing the product is not very difficult.
Ingredients:
- bell pepper – 1 kg
- carrots – 500 g
- onions - 300 g
- garlic - 5 cloves
- tomato paste - 500 ml
- water - 700 ml
- salt - 40-45 g
- sugar - 50 g
- unrefined vegetable oil - 125 ml
- vinegar - 40-50 ml
Preparation:
- Peppers are prepared in the standard way: washed, peeled and cut into arbitrary configurations.
- Grate the carrots on a medium grater.
- Peel the skin off the onion and crumble it into half rings. Do the same with garlic, only chop finely with a knife.
- Heat the oil in a heat-resistant thick-walled bowl, add the onion there and blanch for 3-5 minutes, until golden. Add carrots, pepper preparations and garlic. Simmer the mixture for about 12 minutes.
- Sugar and salt are separately dissolved in boiling water, along with tomato paste.
- The resulting liquid is poured over the stewing vegetables. Reduce heating intensity and leave for another 35 minutes. Finally, add vinegar.
Packaged in a boiling state, covered with elastic nylon or screw caps and left undisturbed until cooled.
