Okay, this isn't really a tomato sauce recipe, but it's the information that you wish came with the recipe.

Steve's mom has an Italian neighbor who I apprenticed with on a sauce making weekend two years ago. Everything is done outside on gas burners.

Anyway, the point of this post is that boiling sauce down is for suckers.

Mrs. A, the neighbor, cuts off the blossom end of her tomatoes, blanches them, and then puts them in giant collanders and wire baskets on the ground and stabs them all over with a knife and lets them ooze all over the place. Then she mills them with the electric mill and the cooking down is minimal because of the oozing. It seems like there's all of this precious tomato juice going to waste but what's more precious, tomato juice or propane and eight hours of your time?

A friend and I canned 90lbs of tomatoes over the past two days. We followed the directions in the Ball Blue Book for seasoned tomato sauce. 90 lbs of tomatoes made 12 quarts of sauce. That's 6 jars for each of our families. So the real lesson might be that making sauce at all is for suckers.

The recipe calls for cooking the tomatoes with some sauteed onion, garlic, herbs, sugar, salt, etc. and then milling the whole mixture. That worked well for us the first time but we thought we'd like the chunks of onion and garlic in the sauce so we put them in after the milling for the second second batch. This brings me to lesson number one: no chunks when cooking down. They fall to the bottom and burn and then you have smoked sauce instead of just sauce - which isn't as nice as it sounds.

In order to get the nasty black specks out of the sauce, I poured it through a fine strainer and then sifted through the pulpier part. I noticed that the liquid that came through the strainer was surprisingly thin and clear and the pulp that was left looked a lot like the result after eight hours of cooking. After about an hour of cooking down the picked over sauce I decided to try something: I lined a colander with a thin layer of cheese cloth and poured about half of the sauce through it. I let it drain for about half an hour and then poured the thick pulp that remained back into the pot. It made a perfect six quarts of sauce in a fraction of the time that the first batch took. This batch had already cooked down for several hours, so I don't know how it would work right out of the food mill, but it will definitely be part of my sauce making technique from now on. And next time if I want a chunky sauce I will add chunks absolutely last, when I already have a thickened sauce.