the tomato harvest season, those who can’t or choose not to grow tomatoes can still process in mass quantities by purchasing a bushel or two of tomatoes from a local farm.
Over a medium flame, the tomatoes are watched and stirred with giant wooden spoons or oars. After a long while of breaking down the flesh and starting to simmer off that water,
For example, my cousin Jeffrey, who lives in New York City, joins a friend’s family in Queens each year to make his sauce in a single day. His words say it best:
large saucepans are used to send the stewed tomatoes through the food mill.
“We work in large scale: bushels at a time are dumped into clean 50-gallon garbage cans with the garden hose filling them with water, a constant bath to wash off the plump red rubies. Two bushels are washed at a time. This year, we did 12 bushels in a day. The tomatoes are quartered, put in a pot, and moved over a big propane burner.
You do this twice -- the first time it’s super juicy. The second, you take the pulp, seeds, and that first round of extracts and run that through again. This step really brings out the paste, and extracts as much flavor as possible. All the while, my friend’s family is communicating in Italian, we’re sipping wine, and everyone is rotating positions. There’s a constant flow of antipasto plates of food (though the morning starts
or split - it gets thrown into the pot."” CTFOODANDFARM.COM
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