Tuesday I pulled all the tomatoes out of the freezer. There were 11 one gallon zipper bags of tomatoes. I washed them all and was only able to fit 9 bags of them in the 18 quart roaster so two bags went back into the freezer.
I had planned to make ketchup. Most of the tomatoes were slicers and not the paste type tomatoes so there was so much water/liquid. I ended up turning it to low on Tuesday night and letting them cook all night. It cooked all day Wednesday. I thought about straining it and getting rid of the liquid but there’s so much flavor in that so I kept cooking. Wednesday night, it had cooked down a good bit but not enough for ketchup so I turned it down and let it cook overnight again.
Thursday (yesterday), I cooked breakfast, cleaned all that up, ground the wheat for making bread today, stirred the tomatoes a bit more. That’s when I decided . . I’m done! I had already added sugar and spices so I didn’t want it to be tomato sauce so I said to myself . . add some pepper, cumin and chili powder and make it BBQ sauce. 12 pints of yummy BBQ sauce.
I had an extra half pint that I didn’t can so I had Vince taste some of it. He said it was delicious. I told him I had leftover chicken for dinner today and I would use some of it on the chicken and make sandwiches. He said “It would be great on any meat!”
I think it’s actually better than the two BBQ sauces I made during tomato season last year. I’m wondering if it isn’t because of how long the tomatoes cooked. It almost has a roasted tomato flavor. No matter how good it was, I’m using paste tomatoes from now on!