How many times have you spent at least forty minutes, often several hours, preparing your homemade tomato sauce, tasty and with excellent quality products, and when the time comes to taste it, it’s a real drama because the acidity is too present? Do you feel like you’ve ruined your meal? Don’t panic, don’t worry. Most mistakes made in the kitchen can be corrected. In the meantime, let’s try to understand the reason for the acidity that occurs in tomato sauce.
We often forget that the tomato is a sweet fruit but also very acidic, which can cause gastric problems in some more sensitive people. In fact, the pH of tomatoes is usually between 4 and 5 and this is what makes them a very acidic food. This phenomenon worsens when the tomatoes are heated and indeed the heat releases the acidity contained mainly in the pips of the fruit and therefore leads to an imbalance of flavors ranging from sweet to sour. This level of acidity increases while the sugar content remains unchanged and therefore appears lower. As a result, the taste of the tomato sauce becomes unpleasant because it is too acidic.
To limit the acidity present in the tomato sauce, there are fortunately solutions to put in place. The most common is certainly to use food compounds that neutralize acids called “bases”. These are alkalizing foods, that is to say they have a pH greater than 7, called “basic” or “alkaline” foods which have the task of correcting the acidity of the tomatoes and therefore of the final result of the tomato sauce.
However, there are also some very simple tricks to make sure your tomato sauce isn’t sour. So, without further ado, take a look at the following. How to make tomato sauce non-acidic? To prevent the sauce from becoming sour and therefore inedible, there are several useful tips. It begins with the choice of tomatoes, until the moment of cooking. Then, one of the probably best known and used tricks to avoid acidity in the sauce is to add sodium bicarbonate which has a low basic pH of 8 and will therefore be able to rebalance the acidity, without altering or modifying its taste. exaggerate on the quantity inserted.