Tomato Sauce – Blender vs. Chopped Tomato Texture

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A chicken curry recipe and a mixed vegetables recipe require chopping tomatoes and frying them immediately after the onions and ginger-garlic paste are fried. But since this causes the tomato skin to be left behind as thin spindles, I considered making the tomatoes into a paste in a blender.

Although it formed a nice gravy, I noticed that the tomato taste was more prominent, and the taste of the green chillies, pepper and few other spices were not very noticeable.

I'm not sure if it was the blending of the tomatoes that caused this or whether I added too many tomatoes (I added just enough of them that the recipe required). So I wanted to know if blending tomatoes can actually make such a difference in taste that it can overpower the flavour of other spices? If anyone knows about this, I'd just like to know the technical difference between using blended tomatoes vs. chopped tomatoes. Being Indian, I enjoy the "hotness" of chillies and spices, and don't want the tomato to hide those flavours and tastes.

Best Answer

Besides the issue with seeds and jelly that have already been mentioned, there's also the simple issue that the liquid tomatoes just coat everything else.

This means that when bits of food come in contact with your tongue, they've already been coated in tomato juice, so the flavor is going to be more noticeable. When you have chunks, the flavors don't meld quite so much, and you have bursts of tomato flavor when you bite into a tomato chunk, but you don't necessarily coat the other chunks of stuff in tomato flavor.

If you're only dealing with a couple of tomatoes, you can fillet the skins off rather than having to boil water to loosen them.