Oven-Baked Tomato Sauce with Fresh Tomatoes

An easy to make tomato sauce made with fresh garden tomatoes with no boiling, peeling or blanching — it’s baked right in the oven!

So I sometimes get ideas. Like I should put window boxes outside of my kitchen and only pick fresh herbs like I live in a magical cottage! Or from now on, I’ll just whip up homemade ketchup any time we need it! That would be so easy! Let me emphasize these are i d e a s lol. But I’ve always wanted to try making my pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes — but then I’d see a recipe and read boiling/blanching/peeling and it’d be like *record scratch* that’s the end of that, pull out the Prego. Then I stumbled across this recipe from Wonderful Life Farm and it was on!

This sauce uses fresh tomatoes but bakes in the oven and while you do have to cut up a few things, absolutely no boiling/peeling/blanching is required. It also does require a food processor or immersion blender but overall the effort was minimal and it was seriously peak deliciousness! I wouldn’t shut up about it to the people I know IRL, so I knew it was time to take it to a larger audience 🙂

What Type of Tomatoes Do I Use?

I just used regular garden type tomatoes — I’ve made it with tomatoes people gave me or what I bought at the farmers market. I’ve only made it with bigger tomatoes vs. cherry tomatoes, but I don’t think it’s a big deal what variety.

How To Make It

Preheat your oven to 425° and drizzle olive oil in the bottom of a 13×9 pan (I used a glass Pyrex). Quarter your tomatoes and remove the stems and use a spoon to scoop out the seedy pulpy stuff and set that aside.

Hunk up an onion (I used just a large white onion) and grab 10 peeled cloves of garlic (PS I have fallen in love with the pre-peeled garlic cloves in a bag and use them everywhere. Like I kinda often smell like a Biaggi’s because it makes it easy to add garlic to everything.) Grab some fresh basil leaves — I use about 10-15 leaves, but definitely to your taste — and add those in.

Add a bit of water to the pan so the ingredients don’t scorch and drizzle olive oil over it and sprinkle it pretty heavy with kosher salt and a bit of pepper. Use your hands to toss everything together. Pop it in the oven and bake it for 40 minutes.

The Finishing Touches

Once it’s all baked up, remove everything from the pan with a slotted spoon (avoid getting too much of the juices) and transfer it to your food processor or a separate bowl to use your immersion blender.

Add in a small can of tomato paste and a few splashes of balsamic vinegar and blend it up until it’s your texture. Now I’m a big immersion blender fan and can’t live without it in soup season, but a food processor would definitely work too.

Use it up right away or freeze it in Ziploc bags for later! This is one of our new favorite garden tomatoes recipes. If you gave this one a try, I’d love to hear in the comments!