How To Make Tomato Paste

Hi , everyone .

This is a tan .

Welcome to Turkish Food and Travel .

I'm excited to share one of the essential ingredients in Turkish cuisine , how to make tomato paste at home .

Since it's the basic ingredient , we have plan to fully in the market .

So uh until now I didn't think of trying it , but I got many comments from you to try and have shared the recipe with you .

So here it is , let's get started .

They usually have this plum tomatoes in the season in the market for lower prices .

It was like 1 50 Turkish and the thing is it also has lots of meat , not too many juice .

So it is perfect for making tomato paste .

There are other tomato options you can use .

We have a very famous tomatoes um to make a different taste .

You can mix it with toast or uh beef tomatoes would be another choice .

So as you can see , I just cut it in four with this easy technique .

I'm gonna show you if you don't have to peel and take out the seats one by one .

So here I have about 2.5 kg of tomatoes .

I put it in a colander like tray that I have and I'm just going to Sprinkle about two tablespoons rock salt over them .

I'm just rubbing them a little bit with the salt and going to do the other half of the tomatoes in the same way .

This time I'm gonna use this colander , which is the one I'm gonna strain the tomatoes to make a paste later before preparing the second layer .

I just sprinkled some salt and continue to cut the other tomatoes .

It is optional .

But from time to time , I just get rid of the green parts too .

So why did we add the salt to the uh tomatoes ?

It will help to drain some of the juice from the tomatoes and it will be a clear juice , not the actually the tomato itself .

And in about five hours , let's see how much juice came out .

So here is why I used a colander to drain the juice in each batch .

I got about one cup of juice coming out because of the salt we added .

Now , I'm gonna transfer all the tomatoes to my pan .

Try to choose a wider plan .

If you have , it will help to reduce more the juice from it .

When you are cooking .

I'm gonna cook the tomatoes on low medium heat since it is very crowded .

Now , better to mix from time to time to get even cooking and continue to cook for , for about uh 15 minutes until they are soft after they are soft enough , I'm going to plant it to make a , now it needs a strong hand blender .

Otherwise you can also use a food processor for it .

Ok .

Now , I have a nice tomato puree and we are going to strain it with this colander .

It is much more easier .

Now , since we cooked and to get rid of all the seeds and skin , since the puree was still hot .

I use the back of the measuring cups I have , but you can also make it with your hands after it is cooled down a bit .

I'm gonna transfer what is left from the to another ball and going to strain it a little bit with a finer colander .

Later , I have nice and smooth a tomato puree on my pan and going to do the rest of and here with the finer strainer , I'm gonna get as much as juice I can from the pulp again after getting out every bit of the juice .

Now we are ready to cook to make our tomato paste .

It takes a lot of hours like 56 .

But you make it really on low heat like a candle light and just stir it for a while from time to time .

And that's it .

It will reduce its uh juice after .

As you can see if you don't have much time , maybe you need to go out .

You can continue to cook the other day and that's what I did actually and just eat about two tablespoons of olive oil and check the taste .

It has to be a little bit saltier than a regular because salt will also help to , uh , keep it fresh .

I have nice thick puree .

As you can see , it doesn't spread to the pan .

So it's done in the countryside of Turkey in Anatolia .

Then there is a lot of plentiful of sun in hot days in summer , they usually cook it under the sun and it makes it even more delicious .

But it is of course , uh harder to do it in big cities .

I was very curious about how much tomato paste I got from five kg of tomatoes .

So I'm going to scale it in a moment after you transfer your tomato paste to a jar , make sure you cover it all the way with olive oil .

This way , it will be sealed from the air and will help not to get mold on top because sometimes it can happen and make sure you keep it in the fridge .

So let's scale it .

I just first scale a empty jar and here it is about 630 g , let's say .

And for the rest , I just used a small bowl because it wasn't that much .

And this one was about 260 g .

So in total , I got about 900 g of tomato paste from five kg .

We use it widely in Turkish cuisine along with pepper paste , which I already shared recently on my channel , check the links for the paste recipe and also some example dishes you can use .

Thanks for watching .

I hope to see you in another Turkish food and travel videos .