Tomatopalooza

what do I do with all that sauce?

Tomato Sauce of various kinds. The fruit of ten hours of labor

Perhaps you’ve seen images on Instagram or YouTube of families gathering during prime tomato season to preserve all that fruit as I do each year. Some of you have asked me what I do with my yearly haul, if I eat that much pasta in tomato sauce. Well, no, I actually don’t eat that much pasta (as much as I long to). I do use the sauces we make nearly everyday though. Think about all the different tomato products you have in the house: peeled tomatoes in juice, unseasoned smooth tomato sauce, chopped tomatoes in sauce or juice, tomato paste, even ketchup. The sauces we make each year take the place of all of this, although I do admit to buying and using Mutti tomato paste and a really good artisan made “concentrato,” the Italian word for paste in this case. An aside, while in Parma leading a food tour we drove by the Mutti plant several times. If you’re going to buy tomato product to use in cooking I think Mutti is the best. The last time I was at Eataly they seemed to have a pretty full range of the stuff.

Back to our tomatoes. I say “ours” because the canning extravaganza is carried out by three of us. There is my friend Kazi Pitelka, former first chair violist with the LA Opera orchestra before she retired and now ceramicist and always amazing gardener. And there is Royce Burke a younger (than us) LA chef who adopted me during the pandemic and has become a dear friend. It is work that requires many hands.

Anyway, back to what I do with our haul which you can see in the photo above. That was the result of our most recent summer 2023 canning session. Three hundred pounds of tomatoes yielded sixty-eight quarts of sauce. We did three products this year. For the first time we did “passata,” which is made by first boiling the tomatoes to break down the cell walls and allow some of the tomato water to come out. They are then passed through the mill then canned with only salt. We always make two cooked sauces that we make with the puree that results from passing raw tomatoes through the mill. (I know that most people do not put the tomatoes through the mill raw). Pomodoro is cooked with olive oil, garlic and salt. Puttanesca is cooked with olive oil, garlic, Calabrian hot chile pepper flakes, Kalamata olives and capers packed in salt.

Kazi’s kitchen with tomatoes off her vines getting ready for their time in the jar.

The pomodoro is a pretty neutral sauce I use in all non-Italian cooking whenever a dish calls for tomato sauce, or peeled tomatoes, tomatoes in juice and yes, even tomato paste. This simple switch amps up flavor in everything I make. If I want even more flavor and a piquant something-something I’ll use the puttanesca sauce. I love it for napping chile rellenos or occasionally in Indian dishes. But my greatest success has been making Spaghetti alla Puttanesca with my jarred puttanesca sauce as the base and recooking it with additional garlic, olives and capers and evo. Friends rave about the super flavored pasta dish. I have to say I am looking forward to using the passata for Amatriciana and Marcella’s buttery, onion inflected sauce.