Tomato Passata (Italian)

Passata is an Italian word that comes from the Italian verb passare, in English it means go through. Tomato passata is the base for all Italian tomato sauces. It is uncooked tomato puree without seeds or skins which is seasoned liberally with salt, bottled and preserved to be used in sauce dishes throughout the year. Essentially, it is tomato sauce in its rawest form. It can not be eaten directly from the bottle as it requires cooking until the tomatoes’ raw acidity is neutralised and the sauce is thickened for eating.

Tomato Sauce Day is when Italians all around the world get together with their families to make, bottle and preserve tomato passata to stock up the cupboards and use for the year. The call of Tomato Sauce Day is felt loud and strong across each family as it stands for so much more than the end product of having passata to take home. It mostly stands for family, for a coming together of all the generations and for making something together that is shared between all.

What do you use Passata for?
You can use it to make pizza, or just add it in many pasta sauces, such as sugo all’amatriciana, penne alla vodka, lasagna, spaghetti with tomato sauce or fresh egg noodles with bolognese sauce (Ragù alla Bolognese). There are many Italian recipes that require the use of the tomato passata.

Best Tomato Variety for Passata
For tomato passata, it is important that the tomatoes sourced are vine ripened. Whichever breed of tomato you go for, if they aren’t vine ripened, they won’t yield enough flavourful liquid for your passata. The flavour of the tomato passata comes not just from the tomato juice, but mainly from the tomato skins. While you can make passata from many different varieties of tomatoes, we use vine ripened roma tomatoes as we feel it yields the best results for us.

Working in batches
While sauce making is often done in large numbers to last 12 months, it can be done on a much smaller scale. To determine exactly what you will need, you first need to decide how many bottles you want to make and then work backwards. Every 1kg tomatoes will make approximate. 1 x 750ml bottle of passata. For our sauce day, we made 364 bottles from 34 x 12kg cases.

Basil
During the passata making process, a large basil leaf is placed in the bottom of each bottle before the passata is poured in so that it infuses the liquid as it is stored in cupboards during the year. If, like me, you can’t seem to get basil to grow, as long as you find fragrant basil leaves, you’ll be fine.

Salt
Salt is certainly not the hero, but plays a very important role. It is added to the passata just prior to pouring and sealing the bottles to both season the sauce but also to help preserve the passata which will last in the bottles for up to 3 years. Use a good quality sea salt or kosher salt.

Equipment
Large buckets – for washing and storing the tomatoes
Small paring knives – for coring the tomatoes
Large aluminium stock pot – for boiling the tomatoes
Large triple ring gas burner – used with aluminium pot and metal drum
Large full gas bottle (depending on the amount of tomatoes, you may need to refill it)
Large stainless steel strainer
Large piece cheesecloth (or a tea towel for small quantities)
Electric tomato press (required for large batches, or a mouli for small quantities)
750ml beer bottles – with bottle cap top (1kg tomatoes makes approx. 1 x 750ml bottle of passata)
Bottle caps and a capping machine
Large metal drum – for boiling the bottles (or use large aluminium pot for small quantities)

Process
To start, ensure your sauce bottles are clean and sterilised before beginning the process. We reuse our bottles each year and the weekend prior to sauce day, the bottles are properly washed and sterilised.

Fill large buckets halfway with water and add as many tomatoes to each bucket as possible. Using a paring knife, take each tomato out of the water, wipe the tomatoes then remove the centre core and any bad bits of the tomatoes you can see. Then set cleaned tomatoes aside in washed crates ready for the next step.

Fill the large aluminium pot half full with water and heat over the gas till boiling. In batches, blanch the tomatoes till softened, and the skins start to peel slightly. Scoop them out with the strainer and place them on the cheesecloth.

Twist the cheesecloth gently to drain off any excess water from the tomatoes (you want to ensure that you are only removing water and not tomato juice) and then transfer the tomatoes to a large bucket ready for the tomato press (or mouli).

At this stage, it is important to start working in batches. Place a large sterilised bucket under the spout of your tomato press where the juice will extract and another small bucket under spout where the skins will extract, and gently guide the blanched tomatoes through the press. After the first pass of a batch of tomatoes, take the skins and seeds and pass them back through the tomato press another 3 times. The skins are really what provides the flavour and the thickness to the sauce.

Each time the skins are passed through, it becomes harder for the machine to process them. You will need to press down on the skins to guide them, but ensure you listen to the sounds of your machine and ease off if it sounds under strain.

Season the passata to taste with salt, and stir in with a large spoon.

You are now ready for the bottling stage. Push a large basil leaf (or two smaller leaves) in the spout of each clean bottle and fill with the prepared passata using a funnel.

Ensure you leave a gap of a couple of centimetres at the top and then seal each bottle using a capping machine.

The final step in the process, and the step that ensures the sauce’s preservation, is to boil the bottles. To prepare the bottles for boiling, place your drum over the gas hob. Put a thick towel in the base of your drum, and start layering the bottles in, ensuring that you use old rags (or newspaper) between the bottles so that when they are boiling they don’t hit each other and shatter. Continue to build up the bottles in the drum until you are out of space, or out of bottles.

Fill the drum with cold water and slowly bring it to a boil over the gas. Boil for 30 minutes and then turn off the gas and allow the drum to cool overnight (the bottles and water will take a long time to cool enough for them to be removed from the drum without burning you).

Remove the bottles gently and then store in a cool, dry and dark place until you are ready to use.