Project "Tomato Sauce" 2010

So I have been getting so many inquiries from my friends and family when I talk about how my family here in Italy makes their own tomato sauce every year. I mean it blew my mind the first time I heard about it and couldn't even imagine what it entailed. However, it is very common for Italians to make their own tomato sauce for a couple reasons. First of all, they use tomato sauce like Chinese eat rice.... it's a staple. Secondly, they have easy access to purchase a large amount of tomatoes since there are fields all around them. Thirdly, they can stick with someone they trust and ensure that no medicines have been used. Fourthly, store-bought tomato sauces contain preservatives and who knows what else. So, once a year in the months of July and August when tomatoes are best for picking and grow naturally, Italian families everywhere get together and make their own tomato sauce to last well over a year. To them, it's just another chore they are doing, to me, it's a learning process and a beautiful experience.

Okay, just to give you a little run down of the process and what

it entails... And unlike what my friend thinks, we do not put them in a huge container and stomp on them with our feet as Lucy did with grapes. =) So I apologize but I will have to kill that stereotype.

1. Wash all the bottles that have been saved up for the year and allow them to dry.

2. Start picking out all the stems and bad tomatoes from the crates.

3. Rinse and wash all the tomatoes a bucket at a time.

4. Start boiling a huge bucket of water over a big fire. And when I

say huge I mean like the picture below:

5. Once the water is boiling, dump in a load of tomatoes to cook.

6. Once they are softened, about 20 minutes, drain them in a basket with a linen cloth to drain the water.

7. Then put them in this machine that separates the juice from the pulp. As seen in this picture below:

8. Then add salt to the sauce that has been produced and mix.

9. Then start filling up your bottles with the sauce!

10. Some of the bottles will just have sauce. In other bottles, we fill them with fresh tomatoes and then fill in the rest of the open gaps with tomato sauce and top it off with a couple basil leaves. See picture below. Don't the tomatoes look perfect?

11. Let the bottles cool then top them off with their caps.

12. In another HUGE container, start filling them up with the bottled tomato sauce laying down.

13. Once the container is filled about 7/8 up, fill the container with water.

14. Start a fire underneath and cook once again until the water boils.

15. Once the water boils, blow out the fire, but leave the bottles in there to sit until the next day for cooling and removal.

16. This second time cooking allows the bottles to seal tightly and with the salt added allows the tomato sauce to be preserved and stay good for well over a year in "natural" preservation. Another reason why the sauce doesn't go bad is that the tomatoes are picked from their vines at the exact appropriate time they should be picked. This is the key point to remember here.

* Please note that Steps 5 to 8 are repeated however many times you have of crates of tomatoes. On our first round, we had 350 kilograms of tomatoes (around over 700 lbs) and it was about 6 rounds of boiling making around 180 liters of tomato sauce. This was day one, day two is next week and my husband's dad wants to make 400 kg at that time!

And that, my friends, is tomato sauce made the genuine Italian way! Cool right? It's a whole lot of work and a lot of sweat and some bickering amongst the family, but I love it! =) There is truly nothing like traditions to get the family together. Hope you learned a thing or two and enjoyed my reenactment. =)