Autumn is peak tomato season. The crop starts to ramp up in February, but really hits its stride in autumn. We are picking a couple of baskets full of red, ripe tomatoes twice a week, with smaller picks in-between for lunches and salads as needed. The big pick goes straight into the large 5 litre copper boilers on the stove with herbs, onions and garlic, to be reduced down to pulp and preserved in sterilised glass jars as tomato passata for use throughout the year in all sorts of meals from pasta sauce to a lovely flavourful addition to soups and stews.

I always start with good olive oil, onions and garlic. I can’t think of anything more delicious than the smell of hot olive oil, and then the salivating addition of the onions and garlic heating and lightly browning as I toss the pan to keep it all moving so that nothing burns. It’s like foreplay. It fills the kitchen with such a wonderful aroma. When Janine comes in from the garden, she always comments how delicious the kitchen smells, and it’s true. I remember years ago when I used to work at the National Arts School in East Sydney. I would cook lunch for the students on Fridays. It was the only day that I came in as a part timer. All the full time staff took their rostered day off on Friday to get a long weekend. They all taught Throwing and hand-building, all the easy enjoyable subjects. So I got the day to teach all the difficult stuff that nobody else wanted to teach, like kiln and firing technology, glaze technology, clay body chemistry and OH&S.

I attempted to make the day more enjoyable by cooking lunch for them, otherwise, many of them wouldn’t bother to turn up at all. I had to keep to a strict budget of $1 per student or less, as no one was funding this exercise. I also noticed that some of the younger student were running perilously short of money by late in the week. So had to resort to going to the Hari Krishna’s in the evening and sit through an hour of indoctrination, so as to get a free veggie meal at the end. That was the real incentive to start cooking for them. One really good cheap brown rice and vegetable meal each week to make sure that they got some proper food with minerals and fresh vitamins. It was fresh, filling, tasty, and free. So they nearly all turned up, as did some of the staff from the library and office on occasions.

Art students don’t usually enrol in Art School to learn technical stuff. They want to express themselves creatively. My subjects weren’t that popular. They mostly turned up because they wanted to get a pass mark. But there were a few quite keen ones. One day while starting to cook lunch, we had a famous chef and restauranteur as a student at the time and he stuck his head over the upstairs rail from the room next door and yelled out how delicious the smells wafting up to his studio were. He offered the analysis that he might be detecting truffles sautéed in cultured butter with thyme and bay leaves. I said NO. Then he suggested some other exotic combination. Again, NO!

I told him that it was just olive oil and garlic so far, nothing else added – yet. He was amazed. It really is that flavoursome.So that is how I start most batches of tomato passata, once the onions are just starting to brown, I add the garlic half way through so that it doesn’t burn. I add in the basket load of tomatoes. It takes about 30 minutes to chop my way through two basketsful of soft ripe tomatoes. Once they are in and heating up, I add in the chopped capsicums, a chilli, pepper corns, loads of sweet basil, a couple of bay leaves, some thyme and or sage and or marjoram, even parsley, whatever is in abundance.

Once all the boilers are full to the brim, I let them simmer for half and hour, to make sure that everything is very soft, as the next step is to pass it all through the kitchen mouli sieve. I wait, usually until the next evening, when its all cooled down before attempting to sieve it. This removes all the herb stalks and tomato skins , etc. 

What is left is then reheated on the stove on a low heat to simmer and reduce by about 1/4 to concentrate it. Once this is ready, then I wash and sterilise the glass jars in the oven and bottle the sauce while it is still very hot. If the hot jars are immediately sealed with ‘pop’ top lids that have also been simmered for a few minutes, then the jars will self vacuum seal on cooling  and the sauce will keep for a year or more without any more energy needing to be applied to it. They never last a year. It’s too delicious.

It’s been a very good tomato crop so far this year, so we have already bottled about 30 bottles, our best ever harvest, and still a long way to go. We are already giving away our excess when people call in or if I go out visiting, I take tomatoes as presents. We will soon run out of the ’normal’ glass jars that we have collected over the years, so we will start to use half size jars.

We get about three to four 700 ml. jars of concentrated passata from each basket full of fruit, and a basket fills a 5 litre boiler with chopped fruit, so 5 litres of boiled pulp is reduced to about 2 1/2 litres of concentrate.

I always look forward to making passata, but at this stage the initial novelty of the cooking and preserving of tomatoes is starting to wear off. However, I still really enjoy it. It’s why I live here like this. To live out of our garden for most of the year. Preserving excess is essential to providing our own food for the entire year.

It’s Post Modern Peasant 101.