Fire Roasted Marinara

What is better then summer tomatoes and fresh basil? In my opinion, nothing! I can not get enough of it! I recently went a little crazy at my local produce market buying tomatoes because they were dirt cheap. How can you go wrong with extra large tomatoes at $.49 a lb. I quickly grabbed a basket full of them. I brought them home and let them sit on my counter until they reached their perfect ripeness. Since I had all these beautiful tomatoes, I decided to made a big pot of marinara. Not just regular marinara, fire roasted! This would be new to me since I usually just make a basic marinara. The regular recipe is very simple. I however, like to kick up the flavor and experiment! This is what I did:

Basic Ingredients:

10 lbs. Ripe Tomatoes
Olive Oil
Basil
Garlic
Salt
Sugar

Instructions:

Wash tomatoes and place on a grill set to high heat. Grill tomatoes 10 minutes per side, flipping once. When 20 minutes is up, the tomatoes should be really nice and roasted. Remove from grill and slightly cool. In a food processor or a blender puree all tomatoes. I used the whole tomato. Some that were really charred, I removed the skins and and then pureed.

In a large sauce pot, pour 3 Tablespoons of olive oil. Turn your stove to low heat, and add 3 Tablespoons of freshly minced garlic. Let the garlic sweat for 5 minutes giving the oil a nice flavor. Once garlic is slightly browned, add the pureed tomatoes to the pot. At this time you may want to add additional olive oil. I added another 3 Tablespoons. You can add more or less based on personal taste.

Since I love basil, I used a ton! I have basil growing in a large pot on my patio, and probably used almost three plants worth. I started with two, and ended up adding more. If you do not have access to basil plants, I would use at least two handfuls of fresh basil. Of course if you are not a basil nut like me, adjust the basil to your taste. Cut up basil before adding to tomato puree. Once basil has been added, add sea salt and sugar to taste. (Depending on the acidity of the tomato you can use less or no sugar at all.) Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to medium and let mixture reduce down until it is not soupy anymore. About an hour.

That is a pretty basic recipe, I however like a lot of flavor and added additional ingredients. This is what I added:

1 Cup Minced Sweet Onion
1 Cup Baby Portabella Mushrooms
1 Cup Red Wine
Fresh Oregano
A Splash of 25 yr Old Balsamic Vinegar

Other options for this recipe is to add ground beef or ground Italian sausage. You can add any diced up vegetable you may like. Zucchini is great in this!

Serve marinara over your favorite pasta or any other dish you want to add a little sauce to. This does make quite a bit, but the nice thing is you can freeze it and use on those cold winter days! Enjoy!