oven roasted tomato passata in a flash

I'm of good anglo convict stock brought up on meat and 3 veg but I swear sometimes I am Italian.  My Nan, in her teens, had an Italian friend, Carlo from Leece in Italy.  He was a migrant worker in her sleepy home town and their friendship was apparently not of the romantic kind but I think he held a torch for her.

They have exchanged Christmas cards and calendars for almost 70 years and I always delighted at seeing his broken English/Italian writing.  Sadly, we haven't heard from Carlo in a few years so I'm thinking maybe he passed away.

In my fantasy they had an affair and my mum was the offspring so it's true I have Italian blood running through my veins!! Hehehe this is really not the case by the way....but I can dream....

So it's with pleasure that Mr. GW and I live the lives of an old Nonna and Nonno - me in the kitchen and he in the garden.  (But for the record we aren't that old!!) We didn't plan our lives to be like this but it has been a natural transition which has evolved after almost 20 years together and I just love it.

It's days like making this passata that I wish I had a large Italian family and we all did it together then sitting down to a big table of gluttonous delights ~ eating from the garden crops and drinking homemade red wine from small glasses.....yet I'm an only child!

But lucky for me this recipe is so simple I can do it all myself.

We have grown lots of different varieties of tomatoes this year - heirloom to cherry tomatoes, romas, grosse lisse and a few self seeded unknown varieties.  Down here in South-west Victoria, we have had a very mild summer with only a handful of days over 30c, which suits me nicely but is not great for the tomatoes nor the other crops like our eggplants, corn, capsicums and strawberries.  It's been slow and steady which has been great as sometimes it can be overwhelming trying to deal with kilos and kilos of produce all at once.

This sauce is super quick, the longest time is the cooking time of the tomatoes in the oven and then the time you need them in the water bath.  It probably only takes minutes to get them ready for the oven, mouli them, pour into jars and then that's it. 

I made 3 types of sauce, the first a  mixture of cherry tomatoes and a few baby capsicums - pictured above - with some garlic cloves, with the skin left on.  Second was tomatoes with red onions and garlic, skins all on - pictured below - and thirdly just straight tomato.

All you need do is to pre heat your oven to 180-200c and put the tomatoes onto a baking tray with some salt and I used cracked white pepper.  You could obviously add chillis to this for a spicier sauce.  For the large tomatoes I sliced them in half.  They take around 20 minutes or so to blister and brown ever so slightly.  While they are cooking, wash your jars and lids, making sure to get rid of any soap suds.

Once they have blistered and the juices are running out you will need to put them through a mouli with the finest attachment to take out the skins and seeds.  My mouli fits perfectly over a medium saucepan I have which collects all the scarlet juices.  If you don't have a mouli, you could use a sieve and push the tomatoes through with a wooden spoon

I ladle the tomato sauce into a jug and fill the jars.  I have a enough basil around to feed a large Italian family, so I added a few fresh sprigs to each jar.  

Put the jars with the lids on into a large pot of cold water.  Bring to the boil and allow to bubble away for 40 minutes (not vigorously boiling but more than simmering) and turn the heat off.  You can pour the water off or leave the jars to cool in the water, both work fine .  I find this water bath cooking method is great for getting those stubborn jar labels off too!  

So there you have it, my oven roasted tomato passata.

Do you like to make passata? Or do you find it too hard? Or do you have your own Italian family that makes it for you?   

Either way, I promise this is super easy with minimum mess and fuss.

Ciao, Jan x