Tamarillo Sauce

When we planted our verge food forest, three years ago, we filled all the spaces between trees with seedling tamarillos. They were designed to hold the space, shade the ground and eliminate weeding while the more permanent tree species got big enough to make a forest, and they’ve been brilliant at it.

Tamarillos are the perfect species for this in our subtropical climate. They grow fast and easily from seed. They’re a small tree with a canopy you can walk under, but dense enough to completely shade the ground. They’ve been robust and pest free, and provided good cut and drop mulch as we prune them to let more light in for the permanent trees.

Next year we’ll start cutting them out altogether as the trees get big enough to make enough shade, but I’m propagating more to plant out a new area, because the fruit has been such a valuable crop I don’t want to be without it.

Tamarillos are like a sweet, tart tomato in a tough skin. If you like tart fruit, they are good to eat just out of the hand – bite the top off and squeeze the pulp into your mouth. They’ve been my daughter’s very favourite fruit since she was little (so much so that a musician friend made a song about it!) They add some lovely colour and a tart edge to fruit salads. To my mind though, the highest use is for tomato sauce. In the tropics and subtropics, fruit fly make bulk organic tomatoes a bit of a challenge. I grow cherry tomatoes for eating and cooking fresh, but I’ve moved to substituting tamarillos for preserving.

I make twenty or thirty jars a year to allow enough to give away, add to cooking, spread on burgers, dip patties and rissoles in.

The Recipe:

This is a lot of instructions, but the process is very simple. I’ve just included all the options 🙂 . There’s a video at the bottom if you prefer your recipes like that.

You need tamarillos, vinegar, sugar, salt, any spices you like (or leave them out), a blender, strainer, big pot, ladle, and some recycled jars. That’s it. Oh, and about an hour. You can scale this recipe to any quantity of tamarillos.

1. Peel the tamarillos. This is easiest done by blanching them in boiling water for a few minutes, till the first of them start splitting their skins. Tip into the sink and cover with cold water, just so you can handle them. The skins should slip off easily.
2. Separate the seeds and the “stone cells” from the juice and pulp. “Stone cells” are little, hard lumps that sometimes form just under the skin. Most of them come off with the skin but you really don’t want any to make it through to your sauce. There are many ways to do this. If you have a passata machine you can use it. The kind of juicer that includes pulp, or a mouli probably works. But it’s easy enough withour fancy implements, just by blending and straining.
3. Add vinegar, sugar and salt. These are the essential additions to preserve the sauce. Tamarillos, like tomatoes, are pretty acid to begin with. Botulism will not grow in pH less than 4.6, and tamarillos are generally less than 4, but the vinegar makes a sure thing of it. The sugar and salt reduce the water available for microbes to grow in. For each litre of tamarillo pulp, I add a scant half cup of vinegar, the same amount of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt. So that’s a ratio of 1:8 (or a little less) for vinegar and sugar. I like apple cider vinegar and brown sugar, but any kind works.
4. Add any other spices you like. This isn’t essential – it’s just a matter of taste. I like to add a knob of ginger, grated, the same of turmeric, three or four cloves of garlic and a chili. Maybe some basil. You could go the direction of sweet spices, like cloves and cinnamon and allspice, or you could go Italian with basil and oregano and thyme. Or you could leave it unadulterated.
5. Simmer the mix in a heavy bottomed pot for about half an hour, stirring fairly frequently, till it is thick and syruppy to your liking. Watch for burning – if your pot is too thin bottomed and you don’t stir enough, the sugar in the sauce will make it tend to stick to the bottom and burn.
6. While the sauce is cooking, sterilize some jars. You can use preserving jars, but recycling the kind of jars that have lids that pop when you open them is fine. Sterilize in the oven (120°C for 20 minutes) or by boiling for 10 minutes, or in a pressure cooker for 5 minutes, or in a microwave for 30 seconds (but you will have to boil the lids separately).
7. Also sterilize a soup ladle. This is easiest done just by putting it in the pot of tamarillo sauce for the last 10 minutes of cooking.
8. Ladle the hot sauce into the hot jars. (If you put hot sauce in cold jars, they are likely to crack). Fill to within 1.5cm of top, and if you can’t fill the last jar, make it the one you use first. Wipe the rim of the jar so you get a good seal and put the lids on straight away. As they cool, the little button on the top will pop in. Let the jars completely cool and check that they have all popped before labelling and storing.
9. The sauce will last like that for months, or for a year in the fridge. If you want to make it shelf stable for longer, you can go the extra step of water bath sealing – put the sealed jars back into a large pot with a cloth in the bottom to stop the jars rattling. Fill with boiling water to cover the jars by at least 3 cm and simmer for half an hour. Or, if you have a pressure cooker, put the jars in it, put an inch or two of water in it, bring it up to pressure and pressure cook for 10 minutes.