Grow the best Sauce Tomatoes!
If you love growing tomatoes to make your own sauce, we have some of our top recommendations for great tomato varieties to grow that will be bountiful and have nice meaty flesh that make beautifully thick tomato and marinara sauces. Of course, don't stop at this list below, all tomatoes can make an amazing sauce!!
We'll start out with the classic tomatoes that are known for using for tomato sauce, which include Romas and Marzanos:
San Marzano Roma Tomato
The San Marzano Heirloom Tomato is the gold standard for canning and sauces, these heirloom tomatoes deliver a thicker flesh, fewer seeds, and an intensely sweet, low-acid flavor. In addition to sauce for pasta, these tomatoes make a great pizza sauce. The compact 4' plants produce abundant 2-3" pointed plum fruits. These are determinate tomato plants, which means that they produce all their fruit at once over a short period, making them ideal for canning or preserving. Because of their meaty flesh, they are also wonderful in pico-de-gallo!
Roma VF Tomato Seeds
Grow the ultimate sauce tomato with Roma VF Tomato, which is prized for it's rich, robust flavor and meaty texture with minimal seeds and juice. By the way, the "VF" in tomatoes stands for resistance to Verticillium Wilt (V) and Fusarium Wilt (F), which are common diseases that can affect tomato plants, so this can help ensure your success! These, too, have meaty flesh, which are perfect for pico-de-gallo!
Martino's Roma Tomato
This compact heirloom tomato plant produces an abundance of small, pear-shaped tomatoes, perfect for sauces, salsas, and pastes or pico-de-gallo. This is a very popular, disease-resistant, Italian heirloom paste tomato known for its heavy yields of meaty, flavorful, pear-shaped fruits, and anyone who loves to make their own red sauce should grow Martino's Roma tomatoes!
Other meaty large tomatoes that are great for sauce:
German Johnson Heirloom Tomato
We love growing the German Johnson heirloom tomato for sauces as it usually has very few seeds and nice dense, flavorful flesh. These massive, juicy pink beefsteak tomatoes are just fabulous for tomato sauce, marinara or pizza sauce! They are also delicious eaten fresh on salads, in pico-de-gallo, on sandwiches or for Caprese salads.
Pineapple Heirloom Tomato
This is a beautiful tomato with dense, gorgeously tropical colored flesh inside. It makes a nice sauce with an orange-red hue or can be combined with red tomatoes for a red sauce. See these gorgeously huge gems sliced up, below, look at that dense colorful flesh! The tomatoes are HUGE, as you can see below...
Look at that color! Pineapple tomatoes are some of the prettiest ones sliced!
Pink Brandywine Heirloom Tomato
This beautiful huge pink-red tomato is dense and just perfect for tomato sauce, marinara, pico-de-gallo, or for slicing for sandwiches, Caprese and salads. This heirloom is prized for it's large size, meaty texture, and it's rich, sweet flavor. The beloved heirloom has exceptional taste for sauces, with a deep sweetness and acidity. And they are also huge, see one we picked below!
All Tomatoes are good for sauce!
But don't stop there, all tomatoes can make great sauces, including cherry tomatoes, which arrive early and keep coming all summer long, and are abundant with thin skins so they make great sauces. Cherry tomatoes are also great for short season gardeners who want to ensure they have lots of tomatoes before the first frost hits in autumn.
Cherry tomatoes are also great if you want to throw them all into a blender to make our famous No-Peel Tomato Sauce recipe! This saves tons of time... and it's true, you don't have to peel tomatoes to make a good tomato sauce! We also have a great No-Peel Salsa recipe that will knock your socks off.
If you live in a short season climate, be sure to check out our Short Season Tomatoes so can pick lots of ripe tomatoes before the end of the season, and enjoy a much longer tomato harvest season overall! The Glacier tomato which can be harvested in just 56-63 days and is very cold tolerant and perfect for impatient gardeners and those who have short seasons!
Be sure to also grow herbs like Oregano, Parsley, Basil, Cilantro or Garlic Chives, which are the perfect complement to tomato sauces and salsas!
Happy growing and eating!
