Devil's Sauce, or, How to spend 10 hours stuck in the kitchen on a Sunday

It's 10:39 pm. Pressure Canner attempt # 4 (I think?). We started this project around noon (I think?) All I have to say is thank God for cold beer and leftover Indian food to get us through this ordeal.

So in theory, this post is supposed to be this fabulous story of how amazing Courtney & Shannon are. What Goddesses in the kitchen. What an amazing delectable tomato base we concoct, like fabled Mead to please the masses.

Shall we discuss reality? Take notes, don't repeat our mistakes. And come and join us for our big Spaghetti dinner we're planning. We might even throw in some Bloody Marys for kicks.


So here's the true dish on making this devilish sauce:

First- don't wear a white shirt you really like when cooking red tomatoes. And don't wear an apron smeared with pancake batter from this morning's breakfast if someone is photographing you cooking. You may notice Shannon seems to be wearing 3 outfits during this ordeal. You're right. She is.

40 pounds of tomatoes taking up the whole counter.

Second- Don't freak out when seeing 40 pounds of tomatoes on your kitchen counter. You don't need to go buy more canning jars or raid certain friend's stashes of HUGE half gallon jars, certain that you'll translate 40 pounds of tomatoes into 40 jars of sauce. 40 pounds actually ends up being more like 30 pounds by the time you weed out the bruised ones and bring a handful to a BBQ the night before canning. 30 pounds reduces to less than 12 pint jars (a standard case you'd buy at the store). In our case, we reduced down to 11 pint jars of semi-thin sauce.

 Third- Hiding behind inanimate objects (towels, cookbooks, door frames, etc) is a perfectly rational thing to do every time you nudge the damn canner to make sure its working. You never know when its gonna blow its top and cover you and your entire kitchen with scalding sauce. Luckily we had no explosions, but we had to start the freaking thing over multiple times.

Fourth- A jump-around-the-kitchen happy dance is not only acceptable but completely necessary after trying for hours (seriously, hours) to make the f*ing thing work. In Courtney's thoughtful words of triumph- "That's right bitches!"

Fifth- Read the directions on your canner. And then dump the directions and read this post to actually figure out how the hell to use it.


So.... wanna make some Devil's Sauce?  

Devil's Sauce
(makes 11 pints of thin sauce if you don't screw up too much, probably 9 or 10 pints of thicker sauce.)

You'll need: 

• 40 pounds of fresh, firm tomatoes 
• 6 tablespoons of lemon juice

Prior to touching the food, wash all your jars, jar tops and utensils and set them to dry. Bring a pot of water to a boil and dip the jar tops and just-washed screw ring lids to scald them/sanitize them, then lay them out to dry. Finally, find a cute outfit that isn't white and a clean apron. 

Slicing in a dirty apron.

So first you need to wash your tomatoes and slice them up. We fed the bruised ones to the chickens. Like probably 5 pounds of them.

Once you've got your tomatoes sliced, start layering them into the bottom of a huge sauce pot (we used the canning pot). As the layer comes to a boil squash the heck out of it with a potato smasher and then add a new layer of slices. Continue until all the tomatoes are in the sauce pot, smashed and boiling.

Winding Grandpa's food mill.

Then use grandpa's handy antique food mill. You can probably find one of these at a gourmet kitchen store. Or use the one that's been used for decades in the fam. We put 3 ladles of tomato smash into the food mill and processed it until all that remained were seeds and skins. Scrap the remains into a chicken feed bucket (or compost bucket) and pour the tomato-soup consistency sauce into a large bowl or two. Continue until all sauce has been put through the mill.

Sprouting seeds. Not worms. Promise.

Once you've got all that strained sauce, pour it all back into the sauce pot and boil away. Oh, and the little white things that float to the surface? After fretting and Googling and debating whether 'extra protein' was an option, we realized that they were not in fact worms that had escaped our attention when slicing tomatoes, but seeds that have been über-pulverized in the food mill and were actually squeezing out a piece of tomato plant. Like a seed sprouting. Kinda cool in retrospect. Kinda freakout in the moment. 

Keep boiling and reducing the sauce. For hours. Like hours and hours. Like, don't leave your house all afternoon hours.

What does one do while reducing tomato sauce? 

Shannon watered the yard, planted some seeds in the garden, caught up with friends on the phone, ate Indian food, ate ice cream, balanced her checkbook, ate ice cream again, cleaned her room, paced the house repeatedly and finally sat down and watched like four episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu (heck yes!) and drank beer.

Courtney studied for the MCAT, studied for her upcoming Calculus final, picked up a friend from the airport, ate Indian food, did laundry, paced the kitchen, studied some more and drank beer.

Yay. Sunday afternoon stuck in the house. A big flag-waving yay.

Courtney adding the lemon juice.

So finally around 9pm we decided our sauce was thick enough because we were both tired of making tomato sauce. With more patience I'd have probably cooked it another hour. Turn off the heat and add 2 tablespoons lemon juice per quart of reduced sauce. We were at 3 quarts of sauce so we added 6 tablespoons.

Being careful to cleanly ladle sauce into the jars and leave 1/2" space between the sauce and the jar's rim, we filled 11 jars.  Make sure there is no dribble on the jar. Wipe the jars clean if there is.

Two of our sad little jars, post swim.

Our 11 happy little pints prior to going for a dunk.

Our canner's instructions say that the canning pot can hold 10 pint jars. At a time. Lies. We could fit 9 jars, max. We alternated some jars upside down to squeeze more in. Bad idea. This just resulted in nearly half the sauce magically evaporating from about four of the jars and tinting the canning water orange-y red. And magically evaporating is no exaggeration. We were seriously baffled that inches of sauce could vanish from the upside down jars, yet no chunks of sauce floated in the canning water. We can offer no explanation for the phenomenon, but can sincerely recommend you not try to can anything upside down.

This is where the whole 'reading the instructions' part comes into play. Shannon's an instruction skimmer (or ignorer), so luckily Courtney is a bit more disciplined. She made Shannon unpack the canning setup and repack it because it was a bit counter intuitive (to Shannon's canning intuition that is). Then Courtney repacked it yet again. Then we proceed to make a ridiculous amount of 'mistakes' despite actually reading the instructions.


Here are a few things 'not' to do based on our attempts:
1- Don't put the pressure regulator piece on right away. Save yourself our lost 45 minutes and bring it to a steady boil/ stream of steam before putting on the pressure regulator.

Actual amount of water needed.

2- Don't cover the cans with water. Our canner only required 3 quarts of water (like 2-3 inches). Rationally (to me at least) this makes absolutely no sense. But I guess all that water makes it impossible for the canner to build up pressure so you end up with boiling water pouring out of random crevices on the canner and you end up hiding behind inanimate objects and nudging the canner. A lot. Then you start over. Again.
3- Don't can jars upside down. Magic can happen. Not good magic.

Wobbling in action.

Be sure at this point to open another beer. You deserve it.

So finally, 4 tries in we actually get the bloody thing to work. "That's right bitches." We dance around the kitchen when the pressure gauge pops up. We dance again when the pressure regulator starts to wobble (technical term, yes). And then we let it do its thing for 15 minutes. 

Timer buzzes. Heat turned off. Waiting time again.
Courtney studies. Shannon blogs.

About 15 minutes later the pressure gauge should drop back into the pot, signaling that the pressure has dissipated and it is safe to open the canning pot. This is super serious business. Don't attempt to open the pot prior to the gauge dropping. It would be like the pot getting "The Bends". And it would explode its brain all over your kitchen. Potentially putting a nice little hole in your ceiling. Don't do it.

So once the pot is safe to open, carefully lift out the jars, wipe them dry, label them and go to bed. It's been about 12 hours. Bloody hell.

Once you're gotten over your hatred of the cooking tomato sauce process and come to understand and embrace the $10 jar of tomato sauce from Whole Foods, you're probably ready to host a Spaghetti party. I'm not there yet. But when I am, I will detail how to add olive oil, herbs, garlic, onions, and other garden-fresh goodness to the sauce base for a pasta sauce and will rave about what Goddesses in the Kitchen Courtney and I are. "Mead" and all that B.S. I'll tell you all about how I made an awesome tomato soup with it and paired it with an artisan grilled cheese sandwich. About how we made amazing, life-changing Bloody Marys. But now? I'm off to bed.

Precursor to the Spaghetti Dinner made the day after canning. Ah-mazing. Sauce was doctored up with a splash of red wine, olive oil, red onion, garlic, salt, pepper and a drop of honey. Topped with fresh garden basil and sheep's milk feta. Served with a side of Kale with garden fresh lemon squeezed over top. Well done, Courtney!