As kids, one of our favorite things of all times was the season for tomato paste. It felt like a big festival, the end of tomato season and so many people making the paste from ripe red tomatoes that smelled so delicious, like nothing I smelled in a long time. For us, the best part was when our neighbor, ام العبد Imm el-'Abed (mother of 'Abd, the traditional way of respectfully addressing older men and women by the name of their first male born) would prepare it. When I say neighbor, I want to really say family. Our families have lived across the street from each other for years, and became so close that it was more than family, our parents and grandparents were friends, and their daughter 'Aida عايدة remains one remains one of my good friends. So when Imm el-'Abed made tomato paste, we were all excited. She would make a huge amount in big barrel that was let boil outside all day on wood fire. We would run and collect wood and do all what we were asked for for the pleasure of licking the delicious salty paste at the end of the day.
So a few weeks ago, when my mother told me she was making some tomato paste (no longer with the communal flare it used to be but at home in a regular 15 liter put on the stove), a burst of nostalgia overcome me. Good tomatoes are hard to find, the taste and smell of home even more. My mother makes a big batch each year at the end of the tomato season and uses it for the rest of the year, for anything that required tomato sauce. The canned store-bought junk never enters her home. And that makes a difference, huge difference!
So I decided I needed to make my new apartment into home! I went to the farmer's market and bought a box of tomatoes (for more money than it would have cost to buy 4 of them according to my mother!), and rode home with it. Fresh and fragrant, they made me happy.
I have helped my mother do this many times, but until I did it alone, I never realized quite how much work and a mess it is!
Despite all, it was so worth it. The process is simple.
Ingredients
Tomatoes
(however
much you want, but for the amount of work and how much you need to simmer it
down, it should be a lot)
Salt
Process
- Wash
the tomatoes thoroughly
- Cut
the tomatoes to big pieces. Use hand-held blender or food processor
to chop the tomatoes
- Strain
the tomatoes into a large pot. You’ll need to stir the chopped tomatoes in
the strainer a lot to get all the juice out
- (alternatively,
and more fun, put the big pieces of tomatoes in a bowl, and crush with
your hands, then squeeze in the strainer!)
- Boil the tomatoes until very very thick, almost like the paste you . The juice will start splashing at some point, so you could cover with a cheesecloth or something of the sort (not a pot cover, you need to let vapor out).
- Once
almost there, add salt. Traditionally, they preserved the paste with salt,
so it was a lot. Even though you don’t need to salt it that much, it is
delicious very salty!
Now you have tomato paste, and you could use it for whatever.
One of my favorite ways, other than just licking it, is on pita bread! This
week I made a great pasta sauce for baked ziti with it! (recipe to come).
To store it, freeze whatever you won’t use soon. As you could
see, I was creative!
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