Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 medium yellow onion, diced
- 2 (28 oz) cans crushed tomatoes
- 1 (6 oz) can tomato paste
- 6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed into the sauce in the slow cooker
- 2 whole bay leaves
- 1 tablespoon dried basil
- ½ tablespoon dried oregano
- 1 tablespoon brown sugar (or maple sugar or mild honey)
- 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
- ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
- ½ cup water
- A few grinds of black pepper
- 1 tablespoon tamari sauce (or 1 teaspoon kosher salt)
Directions
1. Heat the oil over low heat in a skillet. Add the onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion has softened but has not yet started to brown. This will take about 10 minutes.
Onion just starting to cook
Onion softened and ready to go into the slow cooker
2. Put the onion with the oil into the slow cooker. Add all of the other ingredients except the tamari sauce.
3. Stir all of the ingredients together; cover and cook on low for 8 hours.
Cooking away
4. Stir, remove the bay leaves and taste for seasoning. Add the tamari sauce (or Kosher salt) if desired.
After using some of the sauce on the first night, I refrigerated the leftover sauce. The next day I put it in wide-mouth pint size jars to freeze it.
The jars I used have lines that shows how much to fill them for freezing. Below, you can see where I marked the line with black so it would be more visible in the photo.
Each pint jar holds about 1 1/2 cups, about 13.3 ounces. I put the 3/4 cup of sauce that was leftover in a Ziploc bag.
