Quote:
Originally Posted by antichevarieta
like i say..to each his own..but that is a long amount of cooking time.
i just did 55 kilos with a friend...we cut them, cooked them down for about 45 minutes to an hour while ladeling off all the excess liquid..ran through our passata machine (10 minutes)...then boiled quickly (5 minutes) to place them in glass jars to preserve them.
this is how the italians do it...at least the ones I know here in Parma.
Our sauce is very rich and thick...and Italians do not put anything in their passata when preserving it.
It is used as a sauce itself for pasta, pizza, etc..or as a base for other recipes. In boca al lupo
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Yes, to each his own when it comes to canning tomatoes. My take is that while people will approach it differently, if the end product is one they are happy with, that's all that matter!
As for not putting anything in, this is true as well for all my Calabrian relatives -- pure tomatoes, but some (like my mother and her mother) would tuck a few raw basil leaves in the bottom of each jar before filling them (probably goes against safe canning protocols, but it's how it was always done). All the other seasonings, etc. get added when it's used. The reason is that they will cook different sauces depending on the dish. For example, on pizza it just gets a pinch of salt and does not get cooked at all before being ladled onto the dough (it will cook in the oven, after all). For straight pasta it's a quick sauce with some garlic, basil and salt (a pinch of crushed peppers was optional). For a Sunday dinner sauce, it gets started early in the morning and meatballs, sausages, and/or chunks of beef and pork are braised in the sauce for hours. Italians are not a one tomato-sauce-fits-all culture, and when they start with a jar of plain tomato purée, they can create whatever they want.
Back to strainers - I do have questions specifically for any Victorio users. As I said, I started with a foley mill so the tomatoes had to get cooked first. When I bought my Victorio I did a lot of research because even the book that came with it didn't specify if the tomatoes should be raw or cooked. I never came up with a definitive answer. For those of you using a Victorio - do you cook before or after? If you cook before, do you peel the tomatoes first? And do you let them cool down before running them through?
I initially did a small a test run with a few cooked tomatoes. I had a lot of difficulty getting them through the Vctorio, and the softened skins just clogged up the tube. When I did the rest of them raw, they just sailed right through and the skins easily tumbled out of the end. That's why I've decided to go with raw and try the overnight separation method. While I personally don't think it makes a difference in the end product