<story><title>Sauce that survived Italy’s war on pasta</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/italian-futurist-pasta</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acalzycalzy</author><text>Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned stuff is done with a vaccum evaporizer: it’s able to boil out the water at a temp of 140F vs 212F on a stove top. Less heat == more flavor</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Syzygies</author><text>Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Paul Bertoli and many other chefs have their version of &amp;quot;precious tomatoes&amp;quot;, a tomato confit. None of these recipes scale. After many years of struggling with home dehydrators, I bought one of those full sheet pan carts you see in bakeries, enclosed it in nice plywood, added a 1500W wall heater, brewery temperature regulator, and a crawl space fan that looks like it belongs in a stereo rack. The top and bottom sheet pans serve as buffers and spares, but the middle six sheet pans (lined with silpat) can process 60 lbs of heirloom garden tomatoes at a time. We often grow twenty plants and supply family and friends, so this scale is necessary.&lt;p&gt;We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till &amp;quot;gooshy&amp;quot;, about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.&lt;p&gt;This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, &amp;quot;estrattu&amp;quot;. My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I&amp;#x27;m put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.&lt;p&gt;Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one&amp;#x27;s molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sauce that survived Italy’s war on pasta</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/italian-futurist-pasta</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acalzycalzy</author><text>Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned stuff is done with a vaccum evaporizer: it’s able to boil out the water at a temp of 140F vs 212F on a stove top. Less heat == more flavor</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Larrikin</author><text>In what country are you based?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early,  be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn&amp;#x27;t a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks.&lt;p&gt;Canned tomatoes don&amp;#x27;t have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn&amp;#x27;t the main factor in the US</text></comment>