I’m guessing that after reading about my first shopping foray to Safeway, you were underwhelmed. I was as well; although there are more “O” products on the shelves there, the target products that I researched were sparse in organic goods.
You can find the “O” organics in the freezer section as well as among the many different canned goods, but I was looking at certain products for a reason. There are things you want to make for yourself in order to improve your health and see the benefits of the organic products you are seeking. So it isn’t exactly grounds for an indictment of the whole store, because it was just luck that some products were either on the shelves and others were sold out the particular day that I went there last week.
I have listed a group of things that we eat and called them the Big Six. They are: bread, salad dressing, soup, tomato sauce, mayonnaise and barbecue sauce. These six things are eaten by most people, and the ingredients in them are crucial elements in health.
For example, if you choose to make your own tomato sauce, your product at home will simply not have several ingredients that the food industry sees fit to put in canned tomatoes. In health food stores, such as Sunflower Market, I have seen boxed tomato sauce that seems to be purer—if by “pure” you mean that a tomato sauce should be made of tomatoes and nothing else, which is what I mean.
But in looking over the tomatoes at Safeway, I chose to compare tomatoes “on the vine,” which are as you would think, still attached to the tomato plant and cut off the plant four or five at a time. At home you pick them and go ahead with what you are making.
At Safeway, conventionally-grown tomatoes on the vine were $2.99 per pound, compared to $4.19 for the same type of tomatoes grown organically and labeled such. I do have a freezer, and I have suggested in my other column, the Tucson Cooking Examiner, that you might as well buy at least a dozen tomatoes if you are going to spend your time making tomato sauce.
Making this sauce will take about two hours with a dozen tomatoes, or fourteen, which is what I bought last time. Here is the procedure:
Pick the tomatoes and cut a cross at the bottom end of each one. Put them in a bowl and turn your attention to a pot of water that you will heat to boiling. This is for peeling the tomatoes.
Tomatoes are not peeled using a tool such as a paring knife. Like peaches, apricots and plums, they are peeled by plunging them into boiling water for about 45 seconds. The skin will loosen and can be slipped off. The short time in the boiling water does not cause the tomatoes to heat up drastically.
I recommend using an immersion system for this. You could improvise it, but since boiling water is hazardous I use a stainless-steel soup pot that has a cage insert that came with the larger pot. You see them on television frequently, and they are used mostly for cooking pasta.
This way I can put all the tomatoes into the water at once, count seconds, and remove them. The perforated insert drains automatically; that is what it is designed for.
After I get the skins off the tomatoes, I cut them in half crosswise and remove the seeds. Then they are chopped into rough chunks and put through a food mill.
Do not attempt to put raw, unskinned tomatoes through a food mill, even if you have cut them up. The skins of the tomatoes will resist the food mill completely and you will get nowhere. If you skin them and chop them, the food mill part of the processing will take a relatively short time—my fourteen tomatoes were ground up in less than an hour. Even if you skip removing the seeds, the food mill will remove most of them. However, if you do that, the jelly-like substance that the seeds live in will be in your sauce. Alton Brown of the Food Network points out that the jelly has a bitter taste and that tomato products benefit from its removal, so I remove the seeds before I process through the food mill.
The tomato sauce that you end up with can be frozen into cubes and tossed into soups, or frozen in a jar and later used to make sauces that are based on tomatoes, such as marinara and stews. But if you read the contents of a jar of marinara sauce, or a can of tomato sauce, you may well see things that don’t have a good reason to be there.
At Safeway, the cost of 28 ounces of Contadina conventionally-produced diced tomatoes was $2.85, compared to $2.59 for “O” organic brand. Muir Glen Organic brand was $3.99 for the same size.
When we look at prepared marinara sauce, “O” was comparable to Newman’s Own Marinara, in that the “O” was $3.29 and the Newman’s Own was $3.19. Mezzetta Marinara, a high-end brand, was $4.89. All the jars were about 25 ounces.
Considering that the only thing you do to make marinara sauce is add seasonings, it seems like the dozen or so organic tomatoes are competitive. If you want to factor in your time, that’s reasonable, but it is simply a matter of priorities. I watch television or listen to the radio while I am cooking, and it’s just the same as if I were knitting or pounding a hot keyboard.
If you buy a lot of tomato products, spaghetti sauce and/or pizza sauce premade, you can reconsider that in line with living organic. Making your own tomato sauce will provide you with one reliable, clean food source that can be integrated into other parts of your organic lifestyle. And when you go into soup, stew and ragout cooking, homemade tomato sauce will have a far-reaching effect on your health.
Comments