Passata: It's not that harda

This summer we found ourselves foraging the road side stalls near where we grew up. One of the best discoveries of home grown tomatoes for a ridiculously low price. We got ourselves about 10Kgs for about $10. It was exciting to say the least. So what does one do with 10kgs of tomatoes? Well, there are a few options, a nice soup would go down well however it was the dead of summer, so soup was out. With our new found desire to buy and eat locally grown produce we realised that a time would come where there would not be tomatoes at road side stalls, damn you winter. SO we decided to make Passata. Passata is a traditional Italian sauce which is usually just crushed and preserved tomatoes. Sometimes people put garlic or basil but we went with just tomato so that in winter we might enjoy the summery goodness of our cheap, fresh tomatoes. Passata does not need to be difficult. In fact, I think the easier the better. So heres what you do.

Get fresh tomatoes. We had about 10kgs and it made about 6 jars of varying sizes- about 4 litres of Passata and 2 litres of juice (Keep this, it is great to use).
Score a cross in the bottom of each tomato and put it in a heat proof bowl (glass is good) then pour boiling water over the tomatoes so that they are all submerged, poke them a bit to make sure they are all in.
Leave the tomatoes in for about 5 minutes or so or until their skin starts to crinkle off.
When the tomatoes are done take them out and let them cool for a minute otherwise your hands will get very hot in the next step!
When tomatoes are a bit cool (not cold) peel the skin. Squeeze each tomato over a bowl (this is your fresh juice bowl) and place the flesh in a separate bowl. Continue this until you have a bowl of tomato juice (or tomato water) and a bowl of flesh.

At this stage give the flesh another good squeeze into the juice bowl to make sure you get as much liquid out as possible.

Strain the tomato juice (or water) into sterilized bottles. This can be frozen or used fresh. We did eventually break and make soup of of it. Was AMAZING.

To finish your passata you can use a mincer to break up the flesh or we just crushed it a bit more with our hands and then used a Bamix to blend it. This can then go into sterilized jars.

Lastly you need to pasturize the bottled passata. Do this by placing the jars into water so that it reaches halfway up the jar. Boil for 2 hours, making sure you watch that it does not boil dry. Once that's done let the jars cool on a bench and seal with brown paper. The passata should keep in the cupboard for up to a year. Done and done.