If you’re here, congratulations on sticking through over 2,000 words on making homemade sauce. You now have these stockpots full of heavenly smelling sauce and are at a loss of what to do. First off, if nothing else, make some spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. You deserve it!
This process may have exhausted you and made you not want to do anything else. You don’t necessarily want to worry about storage right away as those pots are plenty hot and will take some time to cool off. In fact, depending on what time you take them off the heat, you may be able to just leave them on the stove overnight (covered) to fully cool down. If you’re worried about that, you can slide them in your refrigerator if you have room. But, really, how many people have that kind of room?
Lasagna time!
If you’re wanting something more than some fresh spaghetti and meatballs, then I would say this is an ideal time to make a lasagna. You can be prepping it before the sauce is even done so that you do a layer effect and are able to put it in the oven moments after the sauce is done. This will last longer than doing spaghetti, so you’ll have leftovers the next day while you are trying to bag your sauce and finish cleaning up from your day long adventure.
Bag it? Can it? Help!
How do you store all this yummy sauce that you’ve made? Can it? Bag it and freeze it? Either option is a-okay though I’m no canning expert. I leave that to others. I love my Foodsaver and use it all the time for just this very task. It’s a good investment too if you want to save money and buy your meat in bulk, especially when it’s on sale. You can pick up the bags or rolls most places and if you buy the off brand ones, it can be pretty cheap. For bagging this sauce, I tend to use the gallon bags because I don’t fill them all the way and it’s less messy. I recommend help with this step just because trying to hold the bag open and scoop the sauce without dripping it can be tough. Again, there’s no set measurement of how much to put in a bag. Only you know how much sauce you like in a dish. For Jeremy and I, I do about 8 ladles in 1 bag. That gives us a nice dinner of spaghetti and meatballs plus enough sauce for leftovers the next day. I find this method also is solid for freezing a bag to be used in cooking a casserole or other dish. For my lasagnas, I tend to defrost 2 bags to be safe. Once you seal your bags, lay them flat in the freezer. Once they are frozen, they stack very nicely and don’t take up too much space.
Congratulations!
You have survived your first sauce extravaganza. Was it worth it? Most definitely! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the process and any questions you might have. For those who already make their own sauce, I’d love you to chime in with tips and tricks that you use in the process. Let’s start a dialogue and get cooking!
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