Tomato Paste

Ingredients

Tomatoes

Method

Boil tomatoes and then put in big container lined with cheese cloth. Keep cooking slowly so that all the juice comes out and the pulp dries. This takes more than an hour.

Silvana recalls "I remember when we used to do this with my mother. She used to put the tomatoes to cook and then have lunch and then after lunch would check it. Now my sister does it here in a copper pot on top of barbecue. They do 25 litres at a time. The sauce becomes very concentrated , like a paste".

OR you can put the paste out on a table let the sun dry it and make it really hard, In Puglia they still do that. Let the tomatoes dry in the sun and then cover with a special paper (in those days there was no plastic) then keep them in the house.

Note

This traditional method is not advised as it is too difficult in Australia to avoid fly contamination