A great way to cut your grocery budget and keep your food free from additives, is to make your own sauces at home. In fact it’s one of the very first things I did when we switched to a more whole foods diet.
To be honest, we were broke. I had just quit my full-time job to stay at home and we were pinching pennies pretty tightly. I think Lincoln’s face wore off some of them.
It finally hit me when I was grocery shopping, picking up overpriced pizza sauce, that hey – I could probably figure out how to make this! And I did, and we’ve never stopped. We’ve made some changes to the recipe we began using and enjoy it even more.
Summertime is a wonderful time at my house, the smell of garden fresh tomatoes cooking down, filled with flavor.
Delish.
And of course we can branch out beyond the tomato based sauces to cover white sauces and cheese sauce. The basis for many of my homemade casseroles and a family favorite – mac and cheese.
Once you know how to make a cheese sauce, you can start whipping up your own nacho cheese sauce for tortilla chips. or sauce to drizzle over steamed veggies or potatoes. The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Here are some of our favorite sauces:
- Homemade Pizza Sauce
- Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
- Pink Sauce for pasta
- Italian Cream Cheese sauce for casserole
- Basic White Sauce (from The Local Cook)(we do variations of this sauce depending on the cheese we have on hand)
- Mac and Cheese (from The Pioneer Woman)
- Burrito Sauce
Leave a comment and let me know what sauces you make from scratch!
Donielle Baker
Do you have a recipe for a verry thick basic tomato sauce?
@martine, I just stem a bunch of tomatoes, chop them up, blend until smooth in my blender, and simmer on the stove until I get the thickness I want. Then add a bit of salt for a very basic sauce. But from there you can add in just about anything!
I make my own enchilada sauce and it is so good. I found the recipe on Passionate Homemaking website and use the enchilada sauce for soup also not just for enchiladas. I am hoping to get lots of tomatoes this summer and try making a basic tomato sauce for pizza, enchiladas, and soups.
Wow! Thanks for the post, I have been wanting to try and make my own sauce for a while now!
Wait so how do you make just the plain tomato sauce? How many tomatos and what do you exactly do? I noticed the recipes both say an amount of tomato sauce…
@Mallory Cook, Ahhh….I guess I’ve never posted how to make it. 🙂
All I do is chop up some tomatoes (take the stems out), maybe 6 cups worth depending on how much water they have in them, blend them until they’re smooth, and simmer on the stove until they reach the thickness I like. The season and put any leftover sauce in the freezer for things like chili.
The amount of sauce you end up with will always be different based on the tomato – how ripe it is, what type it is, etc. So I always just make more than I think I’ll need since it doesn’t go to waste. 🙂
@donielle, Thanks! I have some tomatoes waiting in my freezer, but I’d been putting off the sauce because I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I thought you had to cook and then blend, but it makes a lot more sense the other way. Duh! 🙂 (Btw, you can freeze whole tomatoes. Run under warm water, and the skins come right off. My husband doesn’t like the skins in sauce, so that’s the best way for me to do it.)
@Diana, I’ve done the freezer thing before – I got ‘lazy’ one year when they were all ripening and just tossed them all in the freezer whole. Actually….I rather enjoyed it, very little prep time! Except I’d always forget that I had to make the sauce from scratch and end up having to use canned. doh!