How many tomatoes do I need for your pizza sauce recipe?

However many you have!

Actually, I just edited the instructions on that recipe so that it will hopefully be a little more clear. Let me explain how we usually make our pizza sauce.

Pizza sauce is just spiced-up tomato sauce. So first, we make tomato sauce.

1. Wash and core tomatoes.
2. Put tomatoes into a large pot. Squeeze/smash with hands.
3. Put lid on pot and heat tomatoes until boiling, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking (scorched tomatoes are awful!!).
4. When tomatoes are at a full boil, time for 1 hour.
5. Put hot tomatoes into a fine mesh strainer to drain off the watery juice. (We want thick sauce!)
6. After about 10-20 minutes of draining, run tomatoes through a colander or squeezer/juicer, which removes the skins and seeds. (I have heard that an alternate method is to run tomatoes through a blender to incorporate the skins and seeds rather than removing them. I haven't tried that method though.)

The result is plain tomato sauce, which comes in those little 8-ounce cans at the grocery store.

The pizza sauce recipe is really about how to season the tomato sauce. So, you can actually use that recipe with any amount of tomato sauce -- just adjust the proportions.

We never measure or weigh our tomatoes. We take all the ripe ones we have and just do them all. After the sauce is made, we figure out how much sauce we have. For example, if an 8-quart pan is 3/4 full of sauce, we figure out the recipe for 6 quarts of sauce.

Does that make sense? :)

Your tomato soup recipe calls for 1/2 bushel of tomatoes. How many is that?

A bushel of tomatoes weighs 53 pounds, so 1/2 bushel would be 26.5 pounds of tomatoes.

How many tomatoes are in a pound varies according to type:

Beefsteak: 1/2 to 1
Better Boy: 2 to 3
Big Boy: 3 to 4
Early Girl: 3 to 4
Pixie: 30
Roma: 8
Sicilian Heart: 1 to 2
Sunray: 3
Taxi: 3

One pound of tomatoes will yield about 1 cup of pulp after peeling and seeding.

(Source: Rodale's Garden-Fresh Cooking)

However, if you just read my info about the pizza sauce above, you won't be surprised to learn that I don't measure my tomatoes for soup, either. (The 1/2 bushel was just a measurement on my mom's original hand-written recipe card.)

Remember how I said that pizza sauce was just spiced-up tomato sauce? Well, tomato soup is just spiced-up tomato juice. And tomato juice is made exactly like the steps above, except skipping the draining part (step #5) because we'll be adding butter and flour to thicken and help flavor the soup.

So, like the pizza sauce recipe, you can make tomato soup with however many tomatoes you have -- just adjust the proportions for the seasonings and thickenings!

Let me know if you have any more questions. :)