My First Time Making My Own Tomato Puree, Its A Long Process

Hello my dear friends…
I believe that this is my first time writing and posting in this community. The main reason that happened despite my love towards writing about various activity and my love towards plant based food was because i find plant based food are hard to make. I always thoughts that the ingredients is hard to find and expensive. So, everytime i feel like eating plant based or vegan food i will just open up my google and find tge nearest vegan restaurant near me. That is something so easy to do when i was living in Bali for few months, even in Medan i can still able to find plant based food in some places. Now, i am living in a new city, Serang. Looking for a vegan restaurant in here is impossible. Looking for plant based food in here is hard. I was having a hard time with my bloated stomach everyday because all the non healthy food i consume. I am not a vegan but i have some problem with my stomach that its best for me to balance my diet. I need to eat healthy food so i can still enjoy non healthy food.

Since i live in Serang, i started making a lot of plant based food. Sadly, since i was a beginner and only experimenting, i have never took picture of the process. I might took the picture of the end result though and its not enough to make a post about. I think that this is the first time that i cook while trying to take pictures of the process so i an very excited to make this as a post in this community.

Tomato puree, this is an ingredient that i always see in a lot of food recipe. All this time, i always skip the recipe with tomato puree because i dont have it nor i want to buy it because its pretty expensive for a can of tomato. I have never understand why it was so expensive until now i make it myself. This post is about my attempt to make a tomato puree with a recipe i saw on youtube. I made some little changes to suit the ingredients that i have at home.

Ingredients

Tomato

1 kg of Tomato.

Salt

3 teaspoons of salt.

Canola Oil

1 teaspoon of canola oil.

How To Make

First thing first, i cut the tomato into 4 pieces as to be seen in the picture. I also throw the green part (to be honest i dont know what it is called but i hope you understand what i mean.

Then i put the tomato that already cut in 4 pieces in a bowl with strainer like this. I do this so the water that came out from the tomato will not be spilling everywhere.

I put three teaspoons of salt on top of the tomato and start rubbing them off. In the recipe that i saw, she used a coarse salt but i only have the smooth one and i decided to just go with what i have in my kitchen. After rubbing the salt onto the tomato, just leave them alone for 5 hours.

After 5 hours, there will be a lot of tomato water spilling from the strainer. You can save it if you want, but i decided to just throw them away because i dont feel the need of them yet.
Put the tomato into the pan and cook them till they’re soft.

After it was soft, we have many choice to process them but i choose to blend them using a blender. I dont put additional water into the blender since when the tomato was cooked, its already produces a lot of juices. After blending them, we have to use a filter to separate the juice from the seed and the skin. This is the hardest part for me because the filter is so small so i can only do so little at a time. To make it easier, its best to use a cheese cloths. I still can feel the soreness of my arms because of this.

When its all ready, we need to cook this juice again till there’s no more water left in there. It took me 2 hours to cook this amount of juice. Eventhough the process is long, we can just leave them do something else and come to stir the pot every 10 minutes or so.

This is the end result and i just out one teaspoons of canola oil. In the original recipe, they used an olive oil but i dont have them so i just changed it to canola oil, hopefully it doesnt change the puree too much. I transformed 1 kg of tomato into 5 tablespoons of tomato puree in almost 8 hours in the making. Its fun and i probably will do it again, but with at least 3 kg of tomato in one time so i can save time making the tomato puree.