Oven tomato sauce

When August hits, I make a point to enjoy the summer like it’s going out of season. Some of my favorite ways of doing so involve tomatoes, and I treat it like my job to eat a year’s worth of the ripest, juiciest, most delicious tomatoes I can get my hands on.

I also make time to stash away these glorious fruits for year-round enjoyment in the form of a simple oven-roasted tomato sauce. Toward the end of every summer, I freeze this universal ingredient, shooting for quantities that will stretch through the winter.

If my soup needs a little more tang, my sauce is just the thing. If it’s eggplant parmesan, tomato sauce is in the equation. On top of spaghetti, snuck into deer curry or toasted on bread with cheese when I’m feeling lazy — with frozen sauce on hand, I’m a culinary man.

This time of year, the glorious red spheroids that are best for sauce are at their cheapest. I don’t often go for deals at the farmers market. I usually don’t like bargaining with farmers because they work too hard. But toward the end of tomato season, they don’t want to bring home boxes of tomatoes any more than you want a sauce-free winter. I’d suggest seeing if you and your favorite farmer can find a confluence of interests. They get some freedom from a box of tomatoes — and cash — and you get a project.

For every four pounds of tomatoes, you’ll need an onion, three cloves of garlic, a red or yellow sweet pepper and a half-cup each of grated carrots and zucchini, so make sure to pick those items up while you’re there.

Don’t mess around with heirlooms because they have too much water and not enough acid. The shiny, round, red orbs are the tomatoes that make the best sauce. Big red tomatoes, small red tomatoes, red paste tomatoes.

The ripe bounty of the harvest — and the cool mornings, lazy afternoons and dwindling evenings stashed away before the frosty breath of fall — stops the music.

Oven-roasted tomato sauce

This mixture is a blank canvas, ready to be customized as a sauce or incorporated as an ingredient into something else.

Makes 1 quart

• 4 pounds small red tomatoes,
• cut in half, or larger tomatoes
• cut into quarters
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup minced onions
• Two cloves garlic, minced or
• grated
• Two sweet peppers, cleaned
• and cut into quarters
• Optional: 1/2 cup shredded
• zucchini
• 1/2 cup shredded carrots
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh rosemary
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme

Lay the tomatoes on a baking sheet with the cut sides facing down. Sprinkle with the salt, drizzle with the olive oil, and bake under the broiler on high heat until the peels start to shrivel and shine (about 40 minutes).

Remove the baking sheet from the oven and allow the tomatoes to cool to the point where you can pick off the skins. Add the peppers, onions, garlic and optional veggies and herbs, stir it all together and return the sheet to the oven. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice as the sauce cooks down.

When the mixture approaches a homogeneous consistency, turn off the heat and allow the sauce to cool to room temperature in the oven, ideally overnight. In the morning, puree the sauce in a blender for a smoother texture that I believe freezes better than chunky sauce.

Transfer the sauce to freezerware or heavy-duty Ziploc bags, leaving as little air as possible in each container. Thaw early, thaw often, all the way through the winter.