Celebrating the Garden: Tomatoes

The secret to Italian tomato sauce are ripe tomatoes. In August, everyone goes crazy making sauce- pomorola.

Aug 31, 2025

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Got tomatoes?

This is the final installment of my Celebrating the Garden series for August. I posted them as a way to bring a little Italy into your kitchen, especially for those with a garden. We all get overwhelmed with too many vegetables at once.

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When you think of Italian food, probably a big plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce is the iconic image, or a bruschetta or caprese salad. The secret to a fabulous dish is using the best ingredients available. Right now, most families are making their pomorola sauce or preserving whole tomatoes- pelati.

I am not Italian. As of now, I have spent more of my life here in Italy than in the USA, so I consider myself a 40-year-old Italian.

I love reading about those who cook their family recipes, but I have a hard time remembering any of ours. I was asking my brother if he remembered, but his only comment was that our hamburgers always had soy sauce and ginger in them. Actually, most of my mom’s cooking did.

Not growing up Italian, I don’t remember eating much pasta as a child, unless it was Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or canned Spaghetti-O. Since my mom didn’t grow up in the USA, it wasn’t part of her menu planning. I do remember making tomato sauce a few times. I don’t know where she got the recipe, but it had three kinds of canned tomatoes and sugar.

My mom used canned whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, and tomato paste. I believe that back in the 1960s, canned tomatoes were primarily sourced from the USA. We hadn’t heard about San Marzano tomatoes. I think one of the reasons people added sugar to the sauce was that when the Italians started using American ingredients, the tomatoes were acidic. Usually picked unripe and allowed to ripen indoors before being sold, they never taste as good as a vine-ripened tomato.

The tomato variety was also probably what in Italy would be a salad tomato, which has more seeds. It takes much longer to cook to evaporate the extra liquid, hence those long cooking times.

This is one of the local heirloom tomatoes; it’s very meaty and has few seeds.

Pomodori Fiorentini Costoluti- One of our sauce tomatoes

Today, with a fresh in-season tomato, you don’t need to spend 3 hours in the kitchen. Primarily, I cook for my husband and myself, rather than a large Italian family.

We don’t have pasta every day, nor do we use tomato sauce every day. If you do, consider the number of meals you might need sauce for per week and then multiply that by 52. Also, when putting up jars of sauce, please don’t make them all the same size. Sometimes, you need sauce for one or two, rather than a dish for a family.

Recently, my Italian friends have told me that they freeze whole tomatoes and defrost and make fresh sauce when needed.

I personally freeze tomato sauce in ziplock bags in portions for two.

Families often save old beer bottles to put up their sauce for the pantry. Down in Naples, I saw a Coke bottle as well.

Right now is the perfect moment to make your Pomorola - simple tomato sauce.

Start with the best, ripe local tomatoes you can find. If the tomatoes have to travel, chances are they were not picked ripe, or they would bruise.

When the tomatoes are not really ripe and flavorful, I use a good canned tomato, Pomodori Pelati. The canned tomatoes, typically a San Marzano or Plum tomato, are perfect, even when canned, for making sauce. If the canned tomatoes you buy have hard yellow ends, they were not really ripe. A ripe tomato should break down quickly, keeping the fresh flavor. To build a deeper flavor, we often turn the tomato sauce into a sauce for pasta or a main course by adding more ingredients and cooking the sauce for a longer period. There is a boxed tomato sauce called Pomi, available in the USA.

I find that cherry tomatoes are always sweet during the off-season. They will have a thicker skin. I often roast them first or cook them in the pan first to almost caramelize them.