Celebrating the Season- Summer Soltice

A sure sign summer has arrived is the appearance of sun-ripened tomatoes to make Pomarola, simple tomato sauce. To celebrate, yesterday I picked up my first kilo of Fiorentini, a local heirloom tomato for sauce.

The best flavor and consistency for sauce comes from these kind of tomatoes. One does not make sauce from salad tomatoes, as they contain too many seeds and too much water. The best tomatoes have a higher ratio of tomato to seeds. The San Marzano from Naples is the tomato used mostly for sauce and for canned tomatoes in Italy.

At the end of summer, when the tomatoes are the cheapest, families will by hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and put up sauce for the rest of the year.

If you don’t have a great tomato to make sauce, use canned tomatoes from Italy; (not “Italian-style”) as they are picked in season and canned when at their peak.

 

 

Pomorola- Simple Tomato Sauce

Wash the tomatoes and remove the stems.
Crush with your hands into a sauce-pot.
Add some torn basil leaves and sea salt.
Cover and let cook.

The sauce is cooked when the liquids are released from the tomatoes and the skins are falling off.
Place all the contents into a foodmill ( passatutto) and puree.
Do not use a food processor, as it chops the skin and seeds up into the sauce.
The foodmill separates the pulp of the tomato from the skin and seeds.

You will be surprised at how much comes out. Keep pureeing until all that is left are rolled up skins.

To use as pasta sauce:

If the sauce is watery, boil until the excess water has evaporated.

Add a tablespoon of butter to the sauce and tear some additional basil leaves in, one or two.

Cook pasta in salted water, drain well and return the pasta to the pan.
Add tomato sauce to the pasta and let cook together, the pasta will absorb the sauce, giving it more flavor.

Serve hot, topped with freshly grated parmesan cheese.

Summer in your mouth!

This sauce can be frozen in small batches or bottled to keep summer all year long!