Making Salsa in Calabria

One of my favorite activities living in Calabria is making salsa (what we Americans would call spaghetti sauce). Each year, Fra's family buys crates of tomatoes from a nearby farm. We spend the day turning these red gems into delicious treats.

How to Make Salsa

No, it doesn't involve going to the grocery store to buy a jar of sauce! We start with crates of tomatoes that are washed and drained. We cut out the little belly button (where the stem grows) and slice them in half longways.

(By the way, we always use these cheap, ubiquitous butter knives for this. These knives are used for everything from cutting bread to picking herbs. I'll have to dedicate an entire post to these useful knives!)

As the tub of sliced tomatoes fills up, someone hauls them over to the machine that macerates them. It's got two outlets: one spits out the pulp and skin, and the other releases the sauce.

After one pass-through, we put the pulp and skin back in and get a surprising amount of more sauce.

Mamma pours the sauce into a crate covered with an old Mickey Mouse sheet of Fra's (reuse everything!) Once the water drains off, she scoops the sauce and pours it into jars. My job is carefully tightening the lids on the jars so they don't open when they're boiled to be preserved.

After we have hundreds of jars of salsa, Papà lights a fire under a giant barrel filled with the jars and water. They cook for a while so that they seal and can be kept for a year or more.

But Wait...That's Not All

In addition to the salsa that we'll eat on pasta (with meat, with onions, with ricotta, and all kinds of yummy things), we also jar slices of tomatoes. They're delicious with some olive oil, garlic, and basil on bread or in a salad.

It's Fun But Exhausting Work

We sit most of the time, though I like to switch jobs to keep it interesting. I go from cutting tomatoes to closing bottles to hauling tubs. The whole time, we're laughing and talking. It's a good time.

When we finish at lunchtime, it's time to refuel. Mamma makes food the day before, so she doesn't have to cook. We had pasta salad, stuffed eggplant, prosciutto, cheese, bread, and other things I've forgotten.

At this point, I realized how exhausted I was. I went home, showered, and slept for two hours!

There's a certain satisfaction when we eat the sauce that I helped make. I feel so much more connected to my food, as I've said before.