I actually made this on Tuesday. It's taken me until today to get a half decent photo of the finished result.
I had excess tomatoes that I'd grown! This is cause for celebration because it hasn't been the case for several years. I also brought home the untaken tomatoes from Street Harvest. So, chopped them up, cutting out bad bits etc, and put them in my big pot.
Cooked them down, pushed and squeezed with a potato masher.
Then all this pulpy stuff went into the food mill (in batches, I should add).
Winding away, separating the tomato flesh and juice from the seeds and skin. The result went into the bottles (already sterilised). The bottles went into the rinsed out big pot.
Ideally, the bottles would be submerged. I don't have such a tall pot. When Italian people do this the "sauce" is bottled, often in crown-sealed used beer bottles and many bottles are cooked in a used 44 gallon drum over a fire. Lots can be done at once. Here, I cook them for half an hour once the water is at the boil. I have some seal failures (one in this batch). The cap doesn't "pop" and be sucked down as it should. I put them in the fridge and they're used next up.
The finished product - 6 x 750ml bottles of passata. Can't be bothered doing an "edit the background" pic. There is soup cooking, and a cat on a stool. Pippin, my first cat, he's lived longer than the three other cats we've had. Cats who came after him. These six bottles make a small dent in my annual usage of about 35 or so 750ml bottles of passata.
It is a splendid base for many pasta sauces, many Indian curry sauces and the base for numerous soups. A most useful and versatile product.
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