Tomato Sauce: What to Do During the Annual Tomato Rush
“TOMATO FANCIERS,” Miriam Ungerer wrote in her pungent Country Food, “begin to get a little hysterical in late summer: they know they will not taste the rich, deep flavor of a real field tomato until next July.” The remedy, of course, is to put up tomatoes, so that they will be at hand all through the winter. The Italians, the champion cultivators of the tomato even though they have been at it for only a little more than two hundred years, are tireless in their ways of conserving tomatoes. They home-can them whole, cooked only slightly; they make huge pots of tomato sauce, using very simple recipes that will leave room for later enhancements, and home-can it; and they make tomato paste, a concentrate of cooked-down tomatoes that is both sweet and sharp. The easiest way to take advantage of the crates of ripe tomatoes available now for almost no money is to make sauce that you freeze.
The best sauce, I discovered after a recent bout of sauce-making, is the least cooked. The ample grandmother in television commercials, who wipes her brow with her apron hem after toiling for hours over a big pot of steaming sauce, has worked hard to create something acrid and musty. Her large family should not thank her for it. If you’re going to the trouble of using fresh tomatoes— and nothing matches the flavor of fresh, despite the variety and sometimes praiseworthy quality of canned tomatoes—you should preserve their taste, and that means brief cooking.
THE KIND OF tomato to use for sauce is the plum, or pear, tomato, varieties of which include Roma and San Marzano. As delicious as other kinds are, they’re built wrong, with too much liquid and too many seeds. By the time they cook down to the right consistency, they have lost their fresh taste. Also, the sweetness of many new kinds of tomatoes, which are often pleasing to eat raw, makes them insipid when cooked. A good sauce needs a balance of sweetness and acidity, and most plum tomatoes offer it, along with a high proportion of flesh and a low one of seeds and liquid. (The acid and sugar dictate the type of pot you choose: not aluminum, since the acid will react with the metal and give an off flavor, and thick-bottomed, so the sugar in a large batch won’t scorch easily.)
Plum tomatoes seem to arrive earlier and stay longer in supermarkets, even if they are harder to find ripe. If the ones you buy aren’t bright red and don’t give at all when pressed, leave them in a paper bag for a few days and they will ripen nicely. Try never to refrigerate tomatoes, unless you are afraid they will rot before you can serve them—their flavor is irreparably diminished. With ripe tomatoes you won’t be even tempted to add a pinch of sugar to the sauce, which many books advocate but some cooks shun, as imparting an artificial taste.
The ultimate tomato sauce, annoyingly, requires the most work: peeling and seeding. The resulting tomato flesh takes from four to ten minutes to melt into warm olive oil and cook down into a sauce, which tastes almost like a fruit conserve. It is fresh, bright, and sweet—the essence of tomato and summer. The only better sauce is raw tomato flesh marinated for several hours with oil and herbs, but it won’t freeze well. Whole tomatoes can also be cooked quickly and the skins and seeds removed with a food mill (a hand-cranked device that strains food by forcing it against a perforated disc), a process so easy that I recommend it for great quantities. But the taste is inevitably more cooked and acid.
There are two basic Italian tomato sauces. Salsa di pomodoro is made from just tomato, onion or garlic, and basil and sometimes other herbs. The version I like uses tomato flesh, but this sauce is more often made with whole tomatoes, and I’ll give directions for both. The second is sugo finto, which includes the usual aromatic vegetables—carrot, celery, and onion. A sugo is usually a meat sauce, and the name sugo finto implies that this sauce mimics one ( finto means “false”); in fact, the taste is richer and deeper than that of plain salsa di pomodoro, and more suited to a meat dish like ossobuco or pasta filled with meat than to plain pasta or vegetables. Both sauces are referred to as marinara, which means “sailor-style" and is used for any quick tomato sauce. The vegetables in a sugo finto give a boost to tomatoes low in flavor or canned tomatoes; the sugar in the onion and carrot balance acid tomatoes, and the celery adds body. But fresh tomatoes at this time of year should make their debut nearly unadorned.
PEELING AND seeding plum tomatoes isn’t really hard or even very timeconsuming. You can peel ripe tomatoes simply by running the back of a knife against the surface and then taking off the skin; if the tomatoes resist this treatment, immerse them in boiling water for ten to thirty seconds, rinse them so that you can handle them, and take off the skin with your fingers or a paring knife. Cut out the core and halve the tomatoes lengthwise, and squeeze the liquid and seeds into a bowl. The harder you squeeze, the faster the sauce will cook and, if you freeze it, the less watery it will be after defrosting. One advantage to peeling and seeding tomatoes is that it offers the possibility of a chunky sauce, which you can’t achieve with a food mill; chop the pieces into half-inch cubes.
For every three pounds of tomatoes, heat three tablespoons of oil in a pan that is wide, to facilitate evaporation. I find that for this delicate version of salsa di pomodoro the best way to add the flavor of garlic or onion is to sauté whole cloves (say, two for every three pounds of tomatoes) or quartered onions (two medium or one large) until lightly browned, add the tomatoes, and remove the garlic or onion after the sauce is cool. If you plan to freeze the sauce for more than three months, add garlic after defrosting—the oils in it can turn bitter in the freezer. I also like to sauté parsley in whole stalks and remove it later; stronger herbs, such as rosemary, sage, and thyme, are also best heated at the start with the onion, but if pureed with the tomatoes, they add unsightly darkgreen flecks that will look black after defrosting.
If you have peeled and seeded the tomatoes, cook them at high heat only until they become dense and lose their liquid. This, as I said, is a matter of about four minutes for dead-ripe tomatoes and about eight minutes for harder ones. Take out the onion and herbs, and the sauce is done.
If you can’t face peeling and squeezing the case of tomatoes that was such a steal, simply wash them, cut out any rotten parts, and quarter them lengthwise. Stir them over high heat until they turn a deep red and soften enough to pass easily through a food mill—a matter of ten to twelve minutes. Strain them through a food mill, which will remove the skin and seeds. Don’t use a blender or a food processor. Either one will simply crush the skins and, worse, the seeds, which will make the sauce bitter. Specialty shops sell Italian tomato-juicers, in which tomatoes are cranked through a hopper and the skins and seeds are removed. Apart from enabling you to pretend that you have clamped the machine to an old card table on an Italian hillside, as cooks all over Italy do in late summer, the only advantage to the machine is that it works faster than many food mills; the texture is identical to that achieved with the finest blade on a food mill.
If the puree seems watery, return it to the heat and reduce it—a wide pan is especially important here, because the less you cook the sauce now, the fresher it will taste when you reheat it. The total cooking time, including the initial ten minutes or so, should not exceed forty minutes. Add a leaf or two of basil for each two cups of sauce (either version) as it cools—this is the best time for basil to impart its perfume, and it is easily removed later—and freeze the sauce in amounts you will need for one meal. The smaller the portions, the better the sauce will taste after you defrost it, because you won’t overcook the outer part while waiting for the inner chunk of ice to melt. If the sauce seems flatter than you remember it, add a few drops of lemon juice.
Either version of salsa di pomodoro is an ideal base for any other tomato sauce. You can even turn a plain salsa di pomodoro into a sugo finto, by sautéing onion, carrot, celery, and herbs in oil and adding them to the sauce, and if the sauce was pureed, the vegetables will give it texture. You can heat the sauce in oil in which you have sautéed pieces of hot red pepper. The key to maintaining the taste that distinguishes fresh-tomato sauce from canned-tomato sauce is to cook the other ingredients—roasted and peeled peppers, dried mushrooms, or ground beef or sausage, to name some popular possibilities—completely before heating them with the tomatoes. Stick to the rule of the briefer the better.
THE WAY MOST Italians get through the winter is by using canned tomatoes, and although you can’t make a sauce as sweet and rich as with fresh, you can certainly make a very good one. For years the rule has been to buy tomatoes grown in San Marzano, a region near Naples that is supposed to have the soil and climate best suited to fullflavored tomatoes. So powerful is the name, in fact, that many Italian companies put “San Marzano quality” on their cans of tomatoes grown outside the area. I have tried many brands of delicious San Marzano tomatoes, but they are not uniformly good, as Jenifer Harvey Lang points out in her book Tastings. In a recent sampling for Vogue, Barbara Kafka went so far as to say that all Italian brands of canned tomatoes leave an unpleasant metallic aftertaste.
Both Lang and Kafka favor American tomatoes, an endorsement I am happy to third—although I find the salt levels in most canned American tomatoes, whole or crushed, ruinous. (Tasting canned and bottled tomato sauces is an exercise in sodium and dried-garlic tolerance—more than 600 milligrams of sodium per four-ounce serving is not uncommon, as compared with around thirty-five milligrams in a serving of sauce with no salt added. The best packaged sauce I have tried is an uncooked tomato sauce bottled by Delverde, a pasta manufacturer.) Tomatoes processed for canning supposedly offer the advantage of having been vine-ripened, as opposed to having been picked early to withstand shipping, but many canned tomatoes are pale, acid, and weak in flavor. Among American brands, Red pack has long been a favorite of many cooks, and Hunt’s also has its fans. Two companies in northern California, 6 in 1 and 7/11, produce exceptionally meaty and rich crushed tomatoes. Both, unfortunately, use too much salt.
The best tomato product of all is Italian—uncooked puree in aseptic cartons, packaged by Pomi. The puree is sweet and bears no trace of the metal from cans or the acrid taste that even “uncooked” puree has from having been sterilized before being canned. Italians also make the best tomato paste, which should be used very sparingly to beef up weak sauces made with canned tomatoes. The taste is heavy and powerful and not at all the same as that of fresh tomatoes. Paste—including a new sun-dried tomato paste, which can also give dull sauce a jolt—now conveniently comes in tubes.
The best way to use canned tomatoes is in a sugo finto. It is usually pointless as well as wasteful to try to mimic a fresh sauce by draining whole canned tomatoes and then squeezing out the juice and seeds before cooking them. The flavor of the tomatoes is almost always imbalanced—too dull or too sour—and not meant to be spotlighted. Draining tomatoes is necessary, though, for tomatoes packed in juice, which will taste overcooked by the time the juice boils down to the right thickness. Many whole and crushed tomatoes are packed in puree, which will work well for a quick sauce but not for a long-cooked sauce, because the saltiness of most purees will be so intensified by reduction.
Canned tomatoes are also suited to the deeper-flavored sauces found in the south of Italy, which often include combinations of diced prosciutto, tomato paste, plenty of garlic, and even beef broth and wine. Carlo Middione’s excellent Food of Southern Italy offers such sauces, and also a “traditional tomato sauce” that is cooked for three hours. The sauce will bring a shock of recognition to anyone who was introduced to Italian food in a restaurant with Chiantibottle candlesticks. It will put you in mind of grandmothers in aprons.
