You can chop up your peppers and just freeze for use this winter.

No help on the sauce, sorry.

Deanna

Which sauce recipe was it? I think I'll avoid that one. :-(

Did you make the one with meat or without meat? I haven't made either one myself, but Annie did make one and didn't care for it either.

Looking at the recipes I'd ditch the brown sugar and cut way back on the dried Oregano. (I'm assuming it's dried as that's the most common option.) Oregano can contribute to bitterness as can garlic sometimes.

Did you use a non-reactive pan? If you didn't that can cause a metallic aftertaste. I can't see anything in the ingredient list that would.

Carol

Here is a link that might be useful: Spaghetti Sauce Without Meat

We make the one without meat, the one Carol linked above, each year and really like it. But then taste is such a personal thing and we like a sweet sauce too so the brown sugar is fine with us. But we have discovered over the years that if you don't use a full 30 lbs. + of tomatoes it can have a very strong herb taste. Possible that you didn't have enough tomatoes?

As to the metallic taste, like Carol said, I would wonder if you used a non-reactive pan as that is the most common cause of the metallic taste.

Sorry you were disappointed. It can still be used by adding it to additional ingredients.

Dave

Adding lots of basil will also bring on bitterness. If your using stanless steel pans and tools, it shouldn't have any metallic taste.

I used a stainless steel pot and put half of the oregano and it was the recipe without meat. When I opened it, it was sealed, I cooked it about 20 minutes, tasted it, put some hamburger meat in it and tasted it again. Nothing helped. I have some plain sauce canned, maybe I should opened one of them and try it.

I'd recommend diluting it with plain sauce. Even 2:1 if that's what it takes for your preference. If that's too much sauce for a recipe, you can always freeze the excess.

This may be a matter of personal preference. I suppose it could be your tomatoes. Under certain conditions they can be bitter or taste "off" when cooked, but if that's the case it would apply to any canned tomato product you make, not just this sauce.

OK, here's another possiblity. Is your stainless old? Has it pitted (like if you added heavy salt for brine to cold water rather than waiting for it to boil)? Then your "stainless" may react to acid. This could be true also of inexpensive stainless with a lot of iron in the alloy.

In the case of stainless "non-reactive" means resistant to acid, but it isn't necessarily impervious, depending upon condition.

Carol

Always a good idea to taste before you can things. ;) Gives you time to fix them before doing all the work.

Dave

Concentrating (ccoking down) the seeds and skins will give a very bitter mix. Made that mistake and was hoping to puree it, but it was so nasty, I tossed it out. Thats the main reason I use a food strainer that can remove skins and seeds as waste.

Dave's advice is good, one I never thought of, duh!!!
But the pot was semi expensive,Wolfgang Puck brand and my
husband is a perfectionist so, although he did it all by hand, there was not one seed or peel left to boil. But we did reduce it and it tooked a couple of hours to get it cooked down - you know, he put the juice back to cook with the sauce ,I wonder if that could have made a difference. He put the seeded tomatoes in a blender, pureed them and then put them with the juice in the pot. Are you supposed to strain them before you cook?
I may tried mixing with store bought sauce or paste otherwise, it goes out.

Are you supposed to strain them before you cook?

Yes. The recipe calls for the tomatoes to be run through a food mill prior to cooking. You also want to remove as much of the watery juice before cooing down - adding it back only increases the cooking time and as mentioned above prolonged cooking time often results in a bitter sauce.

Send it to me. I can salvage it with a little sugar and some fresh tomatoes. ;)

Dave

That's what happened then because he was so careful to
save every drop of juice - we thought it would concentrate
or something. Oh, well, lesson learned,

Thanks

Gee, I wonder who 'stole' my 4+ years of preaching that 'TASTE BEFORE YOU CAN' came from.. I guess I just dont type it in enough every year, maybe next year, I'll post at least once a week..

Food mill?? Cut tomatoes in halves, use thunb to dig out most of the seeds and 'goo'. Then run though the mill. It will give a nice sauce thats skin and seed free with little effort..

{{gwi:875174}}

Aw, gee Ken. I KNEW I'd heard that someplace before. ;^)

Dave

joy, just to clarify here---cooking down seeds & skin can lead to bitterness, but if you removed seeds and skins (and it sounds to me from your post like you did), then just putting back in the JUICE won't cause bitterness.

It WILL make a runnier sauce, which you will then have to cook down longer if you want a thick result--It DOES "concentrate down" as you say---the water boils off over time. A long-cooked (like, for hours) sauce has a taste not everyone likes. Some people swear it isn't really tomato sauce unless it's been bubbling all day---others like as "fresh" a taste as possible and so remove as much of the watery juice as they can ahead of time (I'm one of those folks---I also am impatient---so I ladle out juice at the beginning of the cooking process. I can it separately to drink and make soup with.)

But I don't see how adding back in the juice would give a "metallic" or even a bitter taste. Very intriguing, hmm...

Zabby

Just to clarify what, Zabby? No one said adding the juice back made it bitter or metallic. Just that adding it back extends the cooking time substantially and THAT can make it bitter - easily so.

And pureeing in the blender isn't the same as running through a food mill. Hand squishing out the seeds doesn't remove all the pith and core remnants like the food mill will. They can also cause bitterness depending on the amount left in.

So given she used a quality SS pan as it sounds like, then the most likely cause of the taste problem was excessive cooking time coupled with the probability that pith and core remnants remained in the puree. That's why the recipe calls for a food mill, not a blender. It is a common problem.

Dave

> Just to clarify what, Zabby?

Dave, I'm an editor, and my instinct is to try to clarify EVERYTHING.

Joy, my own method is to cook the tomatoes a little till they soften. At that stage I ladle out a lot of the juice at that stage to can separately. Then I put the remainder through a food mill, which removes skins and most seeds, and cook down to get the desired consistency.

I admit I'm still baffled as to where your "metallic" taste came from given that you used a good pan. It's hard to discuss tastes in words, of course, but usually there's a pretty clear distinction between an "overcooked" flavour and a metallic twang. I've also never found skins to impart a bitter flavour -- I have made sauce that left them in -- but the texture wasn't great (little bits of tough skin here and there).

But I think the advice that you dilute as much as necessary with more successful sauce, to try again with a food mill (I got a nice stainless "foley" type one from Amazon for $25), and to taste the next batch as you go is all good!

Wishing you the best of luck.

Zabby

Zabby, about the only step needed that can improve the thickness is to cut the toms in half and dig out the seeds and liquid. The pith is quite small, so its hardly noticable. My sauces that are run through food strainer, only see the cutting and digging of seeds and liquids, and no heating prior to strinning. I never see any seeds shoiwng up in the sauce either. Then, it can get cooked as long as you like. I also notice that when I make a big batch sauce for eating, it tends to have a better flavor the next day after its cooled and reheated.
Foleys as far as I'm concerned are only useful for peeled and cooked apples to make apple sauce or apple butter. Even for that, they are slow to do their job.