The Passata Saga

Oooh there is nothing that angers me quite so much in this world as a bad recipe and yesterday my anger levels were truly tested. I thought it would be a nice and seasonal activity to make some passata from the abundance of tomatoes the local market had to offer.  It seemed a simple recipe, lots of tomatoes, shallots, garlic and fresh herbs tossed in a roasting pan and cooked until soft in the oven. That all went fine and dandy, smelt amazing, I was content.  The next stage in the cooking process is where everything went dramatically wrong - sieving the damn thing.  For those of you who don't know passata is basically just sieved tomatoes so its thicker than chopped tomatoes, thinner than puree and is a great thing to have in the cupboard for a quick thrown together pasta or as a base for lasagne or homemade pizza sauce etc etc. 

Pasteurising the 'sauce' not passata
(before I knocked one of the jars over)

The recipe I was using (from the previously praised and now banished from the kitchen River Cottage cook book Preserves by Pam Corbin) said I could push the cooked tomatoes through a nylon sieve.  Impossible, stupid idea, just resulted in a tomatoey water and would have taken hours to get through the 7Kg of tomatoes I had cooked.  Promptly gave up on that idea, a mouli is a good way of making passata but I had wanted to avoid spending the money, but decided it was worth it and well I had little choice. Alas there was no mouli to be found in my little Surrey town, all I could find was a potato ricer, which I figured may do the job.  Nope.  This had the far more dramatic effect of squirting tomatoes all over the wall and my clothes (lesson there to always remember the apron). 

At this stage a hissy-fit was more than likely so lovely fiancé stepped in to calm me, i.e. he poured me a large glass of wine and politely suggested a blender.  I won't type what I said when one of the full kilner jars fell over in the preserving pan while I was pasteurising it, let's just say a passing sailor would have been shocked. So in the end I did not have the desired passata, rather a pasta sauce but it still tasted fabulous at least.