This is really a Growing Tomatoes forum or a Harvest forum question but simply - no, paste tomatoes are not always flavorless although some are better than others. But growing conditions determine much of the flavor of any tomato.

And no, paste tomatoes are not required to make a good thick sauce. Long ago in a galaxy far, far away someone decided that tomato sauce could only be made from paste tomatoes and they tried to enslave anyone who believed otherwise. Fortunately the rebel alliance is still very much alive and well. :)

Good tomato sauce can and often is made from any tomato variety or better yet, a mixture of varieties. This is frequently discussed in great detail on both the forums mentioned above.

the recipe for Italian sauce in the Ball Blue Book. Well, I think I will be able to make an excellent minestrone soup from it, but it's entirely too watery to call it spaghetti sauce.

Then it just sounds as if you didn't strain and/or cook yours down nearly long enough. Normally that recipe makes a well-reviewed Italian Tomato Sauce (which isn't the same thing as spaghetti sauce as spaghetti sauce contains many other ingredients) but it does require an very long - hours long cooking time before canning.

If a tomato, be it paste or beefsteak, is tasteless then it sure isn't going to make a great tasting sauce. On the other hand any good tasting tomato will make a good tomato sauce.

As to varieties - there are literally over 1000 paste tomato varieties and given the proper growing conditions most any of them will grow well in most any region. The Tomato forum has several "best/favorite paste variety" and several "best sauce variety" discussions available to review.

Dave

Added: and the Harvest forum is full of how to make the best tomato sauce discussions.

This post was edited by digdirt on Fri, Aug 2, 13 at 18:49

Amish paste is notorious for being on the disappointing end of paste tomatoes...though some love it.

Juliet is a horribly bland grape tomato made for the shipping market. The skins are extremely tough, which resists bursting. The plants are extremely productive, too.

Paste tomatoes are not good options for juice. Their main positive aspect is how little liquid they contain compared to other tomatoes so it's easier to make sauces or otherwise cook them down to a "mostly solids" consistency. You can do this with any tomato...pastes generally just take less time to "get there" when cooking. They also tend to sway more towards the sweet rather than acidic side of the tomato taste profile.

As far as a good producing (and good tasting) paste tomato for the South that does well in hot/humid areas....Monica (F1) and Viva Italia (F1) are my favorites. Some people are absolutely in love with Opalka (OP) because of their flavor profile, but I find their production a bit disappointing.

The reason some tomatoes are called PASTE, because they have more meat and less water than others. This make making paste from those economical and time saving.

Seasoned canners mixed all kinds of tomatoes to make sauce or paste.

How and When to strain:

I put the maters in a big pot and use a potato masher and mash them (PRESS).
-- Get the juice out (For bloody Mary or whatever).
--Then start boiling . After it come to boil, continue for about 5 minutes or so.
-- Then use one of those hand/stick blenders and blend it right in the pot, until it looks like puree.
-- Then strain it. I use a fine mesh rice strainer. This way the seeds (mostly) cannot pass thru. What you get left in the strainer is SKIN, SEEDS and some TOUGH PULP. Throw it !.

Now you boil what has passed thru the strainer, to any thickness you want.

I just cut up any type of tomato and cook 'em down. Can't really go wrong.

I make lots of fresh tomato sauce - this year (first time) I grew San Marzano tomatoes for sauce. I made a batch the other day and was immensely impressed by how quickly the sauce thickened and tasted. I normally have to add a bit of sugar to cut the acidity - not with the San Marzanos. Fantastic.

The sauces I have made with other tomatoes were also good but required more cooking time to reduce the water content and some added sugar to reduce the acidity. Still very good and certainly better than store bought.

I grew my tomatoes from seed this year for the first time and although our weather was TERRIBLE (tons of rain and hence early blight along with hornworms) the tomatoes are producing a good amount of fruit and I am very grateful. The plants are much more hearty than those I bought from the farm store in previous years. If the weather had cooperated, I suspect my plants would have been the best plants I have ever grown (Manalucie, Arkansas Traveler, San Marzano, Large Red Cherry).

Below is a good basic sauce recipe (San Marzano - but you could use any tomato). I highly recommend a food mill. I bought mine from Amazon, a company called Winware.

Here is the first batch of San Marzanos that went into the sauce - about 4 pounds:

Here is a link that might be useful: Tomatoe Sauce Recipe

DO YOU LIKE TO CUT DOWN ON COOKING AND THICKENING SAUCE/PASTE ? There is a simple solution.
After crushing, blending, straining through a tight steel strainer you will end up having something like a thick tomato juice. It will take for ever to boil it, to thicken it to a sauce. WHAT TO DO ?
make a bag from a tightly woven cotton fabric. (you might consider using a virgin white small pillow case).
pour the mast in the bag and tighten it. Now , you can hang it or place is in a colander (in the sink ).If you want to do it fast, put a weight on it. Collect the juice as beverage.( It should be a light blush, with very little color)

You can stop the process at any stage , depending on How thick a sauce/paste you want. Then pour it out into a pot and cook is just a little to kill the enzymes, bacteria.
Voila ! can it. This is done with least amount of energy, time and efforts.

Well, okay then. Thank you all for this great information. I think it confirms what I am starting to figure out. Next year, I will try a mixture of juicy and dry. Thank you, nc/crn. I will try both of your recommendations. May try San Marzano again. I grew it last year in a pot, so will try it in the ground. It seems to regularly get great reviews. Thanks, Dave, for that good thought.

FYI, I use a Victorio Food Strainer, and the YouTube video I referred to used that too. It is an amazingly simple and time saving device. I will include a link to the video in case anyone is interested.

Here is a link that might be useful: Canning tomato juice, sauce, and soup at once.

I agree with CRN on all counts but here Opalka is both productive and good, certainly a keeper. Otherwise, stick to San Marzano and make mixed sauces. Even if they are relatively flavorless, the saucing gives them more flavor, and then the garlic and whatever you put in the sauce take them to where they need to be.

I have no hard evidence to back this up, but based on anecdotal "evidence" (aka, shared stories from others), I get the feeling that Opalka does better in cooler and/or less humid summer regions.

...not to say there isn't fruit, but I find that people further up North get far better yields. The flavor of an Opalka is unique enough to try to grow if you have access to seed and room for it, though...it's a special one.

Also, the 2 varieties I suggested (Monica + Viva Italia) are determinate varieties that set fruit in one huge flush rather than an ever-bearing inderterminate type...so you might want to get suggestions from the tomato board here on GW if you're looking a type that will produce all summer/fall rather than setting a huge flush out all at once. I like to get a slew of tomatoes all at once to can/freeze, myself.

My favorite sauce tomato is Viva Italia. Great tomato. It also makes fabulous home made stewed tomatoes.

Try Grand Marzano (Territorial Seeds)

Use a food processor to pulp your tomatoes. Saute onions and garlic and plenty of fresh basil with olive oil in a large pot. Add pulped tomatoes. Salt and pepper to taste and add a good dab of honey. Slow cook (covered) for up to 10 hours. You will have some pasta sauce that can't be beat!!!

I watched that video. I didn't like it.

Firstly, it is just a JUICER.
Secondly, it waste too much of the meaty part of the tomato.
Thirdly, canning tomato juice take a lot of space, containers.

Fourtly, it is not suited to make sauce or paste quickly and economically.

At least in my garden opalka is a delicious paste tomato, that I also enjoy sliced or in fresh salsas if none of my slicers are in at the time.

I watched that video. I didn't like it.
Firstly, it is just a JUICER.
Secondly, it waste too much of the meaty part of the tomato.
Thirdly, canning tomato juice take a lot of space, containers.
Fourtly, it is not suited to make sauce or paste quickly and economically.

No it isn't a juicer it is a tomato mill (aka tomato press) and commonly used by many home food canners for both rapid and economic processing of large quantities of tomatoes. All it "wastes" is peel, core, and seeds. None of the tomato meat is lost.

If you have never used one then you can't begin to understand how well they work compared to any other methods.

And believe it or not scads of gardeners grow tomatoes just for the purpose of canning their own tomato juice. Sauce is hardly the only way to can tomatoes or even the most common/popular.

You can't make and can tomato paste as it is too dense to safely can.

Donna - before you make your next batch of sauce come on over to the Harvest forum where the professional home food preservers hang out and learn all the tips on the how-to do it easily. Cooking down for example can be done many different ways including crockpots, roaster pan in a low temp oven, fridge separation and removal of 80% of the water, etc.

Dave

"the Harvest forum where the professional home food preservers hang out"

professional / hardcore / people-really-can-that / watch-out-we're-making-science-over-here

I love the knowledge, but I'm occasionally blown away by the lengths people will go on that board to preserve things...in a good way. I've learned way more than I've wanted to learn on that board about things I hope to never have to preserve.

Posted by digdirt 6b-7a North AR (My Page) on Sat, Aug 3, 13 at 21:06
....
No it isn't a juicer it is a tomato mill (aka tomato press)
***********************
Dave, you proved my point.
A PRESS gets just the liquid (water, juice, oil) out and leaves the solids behind. It might be fine for pressing olives, grape seeds, or orange but IMO not a good method to make tomato SAUCE?PASTE. (ok for juicing )

The solids (meat) is what makes a good sauce/paste and most of those solids will not come out by pressing. That is why I prefer a blender, that breaks down those solids, especially after cooking for several minutes.

I could take those waste coming out of that press juicer, blend it (with come juice) and reduce it bt two thirds. It is not JUST the matter of amount , but the texture and richness that it can add to sauce/paste. So all in all, that machine is just a tomato juicer.

The pulp can be (and often is) manually further separated from the juice after "straining". The harder cores, seeds, and skins end up separated in the initial process by the strainer from the pulp/juice. Basically, the initial product would be similar to a can of skinless/seedless/coreless crushed tomatoes without further separating the liquid. If you separate the liquid you get a huge mass of the mostly-solids pulp.

Basically you get a collection of juice + pulp pushed out of 1 part of the machine...and the skins + seeds + harder core material gets pushed out the other part. It's surprisingly efficient. With a good strainer you're lucky to get more than a few drops of liquid in the "waste" seeds/skins/cores part that's separated and very little "wasted" pulp.

This is rarely a machine people drag out to deal with a just few tomatoes. If you're trying to process a huge amount of tomatoes, it's a huge time saver.

Good strainers (like the Victorio and Weston models) are quite efficient in separating "trash" from "keeper" parts of veggies...

Like I said, if you have never used one then you can't know how well it works.

I have made sauce both ways over 50 some years of canning and like all the others who have switched to using a tomato mill after using the older methods we all swear by them for the quality that results.

I could take those waste coming out of that press juicer, blend it (with come juice) and reduce it bt two thirds. It is not JUST the matter of amount , but the texture and richness that it can add to sauce/paste.

Yes you could but then you would also get much of the bacteria found on the skins, the undesirable pithy/chewy texture to the sauce caused by including the skins, and all the bitterness imparted by the seeds.

Your choice but you can't slam other methods without ever trying them.

Dave

Donna, we are in a different climate with different growing conditions than you, but I thought I'd throw this out for your consideration... we don't plant paste-type tomatoes but we do plant oxheart types - most notably German Red Strawberry and one just simply called Yellow Oxheart. These cook up beautifully; they are much larger tomatoes so it doesn't take as many to make a kettle full, great taste and very "meaty", not to mention prolific. You might try a plant next year to see how well it does in your climate.

Edie

Thank you all. I have done some occasional stalking over on the Harvest forum, and you bet those folks know their stuff. Maybe I worded my search wrong, but couldn't seem to find the info I was looking for. (maybe because most people have enough sense to figure it out for themselves...)

Thank you, Dave, for your words about Victorio. I bought it last year for dealing with blueberries, but it was an incredible help with my tomato harvest this year. It absolutely does leave the pulp. Last year (when I grew sauce tomatoes), I had lots and lots of sauce after I ran it through a wire strainer. I just didn't have enough sense to know what to do with it. This year, I did strain the first couple batches of tomatoes I ran through it, and the small amount of pulp that was in those beefsteaks made lovely sauce. Just not enough of it. What I especially liked was how quickly the pulp cooked down into sauce once it was strained out.

After using this amazing gadget this year, I don't think there's much of anything that anyone could say to make me fall out of love with it. It's a huge labor and time saver!

As a note, I discovered by accident, that if I filled the hopper with tomato pieces before I cranked them through and then emptied the bowl right into a hot pan, I had minimal separation of pulp and water in the jars.

Re: Determinate Sauce tomato. I grow my vegetables organically, and honestly don't even like to spray organic concoctions. Add to that the fact that the entire county here seems to have Early Blight in the soil, plus the fact that our incredibly hot mid summer heat puts a stop to tomato production anyway, and I have decided that it really doesn't matter whether I grow determinates or indeterminates. I am still only going to get the first crop. I will try Opalka as an experiment. Sounds intriguing. But I am very grateful for the extra mention of Italia. All three recs are on my list to try.