厨房的奥秘是每周探索烹饪和食物周围的奇怪之处。它们可能是不应该在不应该失败的食谱，来自不同来源的建议，或者只是怪异的。如果发生在厨房中，您不确定为什么要发送tweet to The Food Geekto find out what’s happening.

AprlFin问通过Twitter:

Hi, April,

The major difference between a soup and a sauce is the amount of water content. I checked out your blog entry onThe Great Tomato Massacreto get a better idea of what was happening.

In each of the cases, you were on the right basic track. I’ve noticed with Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone that there are the occasional step that I disagree with, or might add in, and they occasionally seem a bit optimistic with their time estimates. So let’s start with your first batch, where you cooked the tomatoes whole to break them down, ran them through the food mill, then cooked some more.

Instead of breaking down the tomatoes whole, I would suggest cutting them in half and seeding them first. This will save your trouble in the food mill, as you won’t have nearly as many seeds to contend with. If I knew a way to do the same with concord grapes, fresh grape juice wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous as it is. Although that may be why it tastes so good.

The second part of this recipe that will help is to let it reduce a lot more. A whole lot more. Leave it simmering for a few hours to get it to the right consistency if you need to. That will pep up the tomato sauce tremendously.

For the second recipe, I think the biggest problem was that you weren’t using the tongs, and you didn’t put the tomatoes in cool or ice water before you tried to peel them. That combination would have saved you some grief. But the real problem is pretty much the same as the first recipe: time. Because you have so many tomatoes, there’s a lot more volume there. If you’re using a tall cooking vessel, you don’t have very much surface area for the water to break free through, so it takes longer to reduce.

I think you would have had the best results if you’d have used the roasted tomatoes from your third batch and turned that into a sauce. I know you’ll likely do that in the future, so keep in mind that they should be great. The roasting process took out all of the water early on, which concentrates the flavor. There’s probably even some maillard reaction going on there that will help out the flavor as well.

Why is this not a problem with canned tomatoes? Well, a couple of reasons. The first may be if you drain the water from the can and just use the tomatoes. The second may be that you’re a little more patient for the rest of the cooking if you’ve not had to do a bunch of work on the tomatoes already. The third is that the tomatoes, when canned, have some acid added to them for the canning process. That will add a little extra spike that you’re missing.

不过，大多数情况下，一切都与水有关。减少酱汁，您将拥有更多类似于您想要的番茄酱。