Is Tomato Sauce A Vegetable?

on September 18, 2022

Tomato sauce is one of the most popular sauces in the world it is used on a range of different meats, pies, pasties, and hot dogs. Most people in the western world have a bottle of commercially bought tomato sauce in their pantry. However, one question that sometimes pops up is is tomato sauce a vegetable.

Tomato sauce cannot be considered a vegetable because its primary ingredient tomatoes is in fact a fruit. Tomato sauce typically contains around 5lb of tomatoes per quart of sauce along with a mixture of vinegar, sugar, and a few spices.

Tomato sauce has been traditionally used as a method of preserving a glut of tomato fruit which typically occurs at the end of every growing season when you end up with more for it than you can eat.

Is Tomato Sauce Good For You?

Tomato sauce is not something that is very good for your health because most tomato sauces bear little resemblance to the original nutritional content of their main ingredients tomatoes.

According to the site calorieking.com 90% of the calories in tomato sauce come from carbohydrates or sugar. This means that essentially tomato sauce is basically sugar with \tomatoes to add flavor. So it is not very good for you at all, particularly if you are a diabetic as the carb loading is extremely high.

Does It Matter What Type Of Tomato That You Use For Tomato Sauce?

Generally, the type of tomato that you use in your sauce does not make a great deal of difference to its flavor simply because the flavor is generally dominated by the presence of sugar and vinegar.

So you can use pretty much any type of tomato that you grow whether they be cherry, grape, slicing tomatoes, or even beefsteak tomatoes. However, cherry and grape tomatoes are much sweeter than the larger tomatoes and have the added advantage of being easy to prepare for making tomato sauce because you can get away with not cutting them up at all.

Does Homemade Tomato Sauce Taste Better Than Bought Tomato Sauce?

Generally, homemade tomato sauce does taste significantly better than commercially bought tomato sauce because it contains a lot more character and flavor than the commercially produced sauces which are highly processed and are traditionally made from tomatoes grown from hybrid seeds which are renowned for having poor flavor.

If you compare the flavor of homegrown tomatoes to those you can buy in the supermarket you will generally find that there is an incredibly big difference in the quality that you can make at home.

How Many Tomato Plants Do You Need To Make Sauce?

A single tomato plant typically will yield around 20lbs of fruit according to planyourpatch.com However, this can vary significantly depending upon the specific variety that you grow at home. so typically you will need a couple of tomato plants to have enough fruit at the end of the season to make plenty of sauce at home.

Typically, I recommend that you grow 5 to 6 plants at home at least to ensure that you have enough sauce. You can purchase seedlings from your local garden center and the seedlings will typically appear in early to mid-spring and cannot be put into the garden until any risk of frost has passed.

The tomato plants will ideally require a full sun location and a support structure to keep the tomatoes upright and make them easier to pick. Additionally, it will be important to pinch out side shoots which are the little shoots that come out at a 45-degree angle between the stem and the lateral branches because if you do not the plant will focus on producing foliage rather than fruit.

Tomato plants typically take approximately 80 days to produce fruit from a store-bought seedling or if you’re growing them from seed it is more like 120 days.

How Do You Make Tomato Sauce?

Tomato sauce is relatively easy to make and there is a recipe given below which will produce lovely tomato sauce consistently. To prepare the tomato sauce it is important to have a large pot ideally 2 gallons in size and the recipe provided below will typically make a little over 2 quarts of sauce.

Ingredients

10lbs of tomatoes

1 clove of garlic

2 teaspoons of mustard seeds

12 cloves

⅛ of a teaspoon of pepper

2 ½ Cups of Vinegar

2 tablespoons of salt

1 ½ Cups of Sugar

Method

Start by preparing put tomatoes by washing them and cutting them up into small pieces and place them into the saucepan.
Peel and finely dice the garlic clove.
Cook the tomatoes and garlic rapidly in the saucepan until the tomatoes turn to pulp.

Strain the pulp through a sieve to remove the excess water and return the pulp to the pan
Add the remaining ingredients to the pan and simmer it for a period of approximately 1 1/2 hours
Once the cooking process is complete the hot liquid needs to be transferred into sterilized jars and sealed immediately as this will ensure that creates a vacuum seal for the sauce.