smoky roasted tomato sauce

• preheat your oven on broil at 230°C with the rack in the middle or on top
• wash your tomatoes, peel and cut onion in half, separate garlic cloves (but leave garlic cloves inside their skins), coat everything with 1 tbsp olive oil, sprinkle with salt and place on a roasting rack above a roasting dish (to recuperate juices) and roast 10 minutes on each side (total 20 minutes) until slightly blackened
• in a dutch-oven casserole, on the stovetop, melt your butter with the olive oil, squeeze cooked garlic cloves out of their skins and mash with the chopped anchovies and cook in the olive oil and butter at medium heat for 2-3 minutes
• lower the heat of the oven to 165°C with the rack on the bottom
• in the dutch-oven casserole, add the roasted tomatoes (and the juices of the roasting pan), onion halves, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, bay leaves, dried oregano (and oregano stems and fresh tomato leaves and stalks, if you have some) and stir and bring to a simmer for 5 minutes.
• place the dutch-oven casserole, with the lid partly on (or slightly uncovered), in your oven and cook for 3 hours, stirring occasionally (every 30 minutes)
• after the 3 hours, the tomato sauce has reduced to half, remove from oven and let cool
• remove the bay leaves and fresh tomato leaves, stems and oregano stalks and use a vegetable mill (you decide how fine you want it, I used the largest grid) to blend and puree.
• use as a pizza sauce or combine with fresh or canned tomatoes for a pasta sauce.

*note : the initial weight of the ingredients before cooking was approximately 2,25 kg in total, the discarded elements (such as stems, stalks, leaves, skins, etc.) weighed 200 grams, the resulting weight of the sauce was 1 kg, thus water loss and evaporation was also 1 kg/1 litre …