This recipe came about because I read a lot of recipes for it and came to the conclusion, thru experimentation, that none of them worked well, so I should do all of them.  So I combined them all, and it worked well.

Here’s what I did:

Core your tomatoes and roughly chop them.  Drop them into a pot & bring to a boil.  Get out your immersion blender & go to town on the pot.  Chop everything in sight!

Get out your veggie strainer.  I’ve got a manual Squeezo-Straino.  Process the tomatoes thru the strainer.  I processed the whole batch once, then re-processed the solids two more times. (I had helpers – Aren’t they cute?)

Put it all back on the stove and reduce by about 50%. 

When it’s nice and thick, pour it into a casserole and drop it into the oven on low –as low as your oven can go.  I’ve got a convection oven and process this at 175 – as low as my oven can go.

Cook it until it gets darker – scrape the dark bits into the center and spread flat.  Keep scraping these off the sides and flattening the thickening goo into the center.   (This about.com article, by Molly Watson, on tomato paste was the guide for this part of the recipe.)

When it’s nice & dark, and really looks like paste, stop. (Took about 3 hours to reduce all the way for me – keep an eye on it!)  Put it into a 4 oz jar and finish with a thin sheen of olive oil. 

Cap and water bathe for 45 minutes.

The combination of both the oven cooking and the olive oil makes this quite rich.  1 bushel cooks down to 4-5 four ounce jars.