Mike van de Elzen: Making your own Passata

Making your own Passata 

12 ripe tomatoes

2 sticks rosemary

10 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed slightly 

1/2 tsp flaky salt 

1 fresh chili, stalk removed and cut in half 

1 tbsp honey

Start by turn on your oven to 220*c 

Cut the tomatoes in half and lay onto a roasting tray, sprinkle over some flaky salt, smashed garlic, chili and rosemary.  

Drizzle with a little oil and fire into the oven to roast. 

Roast at for 30 minutes or until the tomatoes just start to collapse and colour.  

Remove and allow to cool, using a potato masher or stick blender to puree the tomatoes into a sauce. 

Now pass the sauce through a sieve to remove all the seeds and any skins.  

Place the sauce back into a pot and bring up to a simmer, skimming of any fat raising to the surface.  

Add honey and check the seasoning and its ready to bottle. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b Mike vand Alison.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Our resident chef joins us.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Now, good morning, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I love the fact that you have a little suggestion
here for those of us that have an abundance of
tomatoes left over from a good summer crop.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Ours are still going, isn't it? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
You still Yeah, I have my plantners. My plants are dead, dead,
as as beautifully brown as you know the hills and
Hawks Bay, but they are the tomatoes just hanging there.
So I'm just taking the rip of the last off
the plants.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
And that's yeah, it's great. And so we're making a
source called a posata today. And I guess the main
difference between You might ask what's difference between tomato sauce
or like a pasta sauce and a pisata. The main
difference is that a pasata the skin and the seeds
have been removed, so it's a softer sauce. It's a

(01:11):
smoother sauce. It's something that is easily a cheap it's
a little bit more of a process because you remove
the skins and you move the seeds. It needs to
go through a further process then just making a tomato
sauce giving it a blend. So it's worth the journey
for the end result, I think. But if you're serving
it with something soft like a fetter chini or a

(01:33):
pen a past or a tortellini, because you're not getting
those really annoying tomato seeds stuck in between your teeth.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
All right, talk us through this journey.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
So we're using all the last about tomato. So what
we do to make this To add flavor, what you
do is you take your tomatoes, you cut them in half,
pop them into a roasting train, and then over the
top we add in flavor. So we're using rosemary for this,
So you take two or three bunches of rosemary. You

(02:02):
take garlic. Crush the garlic because you're going to remove
the gallic after. So just break your cloak, your bulbs
down into clothes, crush them with the side of it,
and I pop them over the top. A little bit
of salt, a little a flaky salt if you want.
If you want to chili this up, if you want
to spice things up, just take a chili, cut that
in half, add that in and then a little bit
of all and over the top. Fire that into an oven,

(02:24):
a recentably hot oven. So we're talking like two hundred
and two twenty. Fire the tomatoes in there and just
leave them in there. It's going to be about twenty
to thirty minutes. And what you're looking for is you're
looking for those tomatoes to just start to collapse and
just get a little kind of tint or a little
hint of burnt criss on the ends on the outside
of the tomatoes. At that point, pull them out and

(02:46):
you have a choice. Now we need to break these
tomatoes down, So you could put them into a bowl,
use a stick blender, put them into a pot, use
a stick blend to blend them up. You could use
a potato masher. You could carefully kind of whiz them
in your food processor. And then once they're smooth, we
now need to remove the seeds. So if you've got
a like a mooie at home, the old old school moony,

(03:07):
you could put the sauce through that and then the
seeds will remain behind. Or a sip you could pass
the sauce through a sieve that will kind of take
out the seeds. And also take out the skin, and
then the end result is this beautiful pisata. You can
then pretty much just seasoned up with a little bit
of salt, serve it straight away. Or what I do
quite often is I reduce it down a little bit,
concentrate the flavor, concentrate that tomato, and then I pop

(03:30):
them into sterilize jars into the pantry. Bob's your auntie.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
This sounds like quite a nice process. You could go
through with the kids. What is not a holiday little job.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
There and potentially could make a lot of mess.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
But that it could, that it could, Mike, thank you
so much. You can get that recipe from Good from
Scratch dot co dot in z, or you can head
to news Talk ZB dot co dot in z forward
slash Sunday. We'll get it up for you there as well.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to US Talk ZB from nine am Sunday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio out