Pomodori galore!

So today I had fab time helping the landlady, of the house I am staying in, to prepare all her tomatoes into salsa di pomodoro . Salsa, I learned today, is just tomato, nothing else is added, whereas Sugo di pomodoro is when you heat oil and garlic in a pan and then add your salsa di pomodoro & fresh basil, which you can then add to your pasta

We started off by cooking the tomatoes in a pan, just until the skins start to lift. We then used a machine into which you add the whole tomatoes. The machine removes the seeds and skins, leaving a fairly liquid smooth salsa. Once all the tomatoes had been through the machine, the skin/seed sausage shaped mixture was placed through the machine several times. This created a thicker salsa which is mixed with the liquid salsa, and the mixture was added to jars containing peeled cooked tomatoes. When they were completed, we then used the salsa to fill jars and bottles.

The next part was to boil all the jars/bottles in a really large pan, this creates the vacuum in the jars/bottles, pulling in the top of the lids. 03 September 2025