[DonDuck]

Apparently many people use canned tomatoes for sauces. I use canned crushed tomatoes for cooking most dishes even when I have beautiful, red ripe tomatoes in my garden. Crushed is the only canned tomato I use. I don't use canned tomato sauce or canned tomato puree or diced tomatoes. I've never understood why, but the crushed tomatoes always seem to retain more of the intense tomato flavor than other canned tomatoes.


I often run into the problem of locating 15 ounce cans of crushed tomatoes. Most grocery stores keep different can sizes of tomatoes, but only keep larger cans of crushed tomatoes. I must often choose two tomato dishes to cook at the same time because I don't want to waste the extra canned tomatoes. After a can is opened, I don't like to refrigerate unused portions. I do sometimes use a hand blender and blend the extra tomatoes into a thin sauce which I spread onto a cookie sheet and oven dry at low temp into tomato bark. I freeze the bark and use pieces of it when I want to give a small dish a little tomato flavor.