Instructions

To begin making your own tomato paste, you will need to set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and let it preheat for a couple of minutes. As you wait for the preheat light indicator of your oven to go off, the perfect thing to do is cut your tomatoes into small dices.

Once you have chopped your tomatoes into small diced pieces, you should then place it in a saucepan together with the 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Simply bring your tomatoes to a simmer and continue to cook every tomato until every piece becomes soft and all of the skins begin to peel. You’ll know you’re done simmering the tomatoes once the tomato skins are completely detached from the tomatoes.

After simmering the tomatoes, what you have to do next is push your simmered tomatoes through a food mill. Doing so will help you separate the seeds and skins from the essentials juices that are carried within the pulp.

The next thing you should do after removing the seeds and the skin is to add the sea salt and the citric acid into the juicy pulp.

After seasoning the pulp, what you should do next is prepare two rimmed baking sheets where you can spread the pulp you have gathered in two separate batches.

Once the pulp is all set in place, simply place it in the oven and continue to bake it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until it gets reduced evenly.

Take note that when you make the pulp inside your oven, you would have to constantly check the baking sheets and stir the tomatoes every 30 minutes or so to ensure even reducing.

Once everything is taking into shape, you may want to combine both tomato paste on one baking sheet for easier cooking.

You will know that you are done baking when the paste you have baked comes with a shiny and dark red color.

At this time, there should be no more water left in the paste. It should be very thick and dense.

To achieve such consistency you will have to bake the tomato pulp for about 3 up to 4 hours.​