Tomatoes, salt, sugar, pepper, olive oil and a little time on the stove top are all that’s needed to make Nancy Silverton’s delightfully simple and surprisingly rich passata di pomodoro. Nancy is a world-renowned chef and lover of Italian cooking and cuisine and if you’ve never tried her food before, consider this your sweet and tasty introduction. 

“Passata comes from the word passare, which means ‘to pass’ in Italian and passata di pomodoro, often referred to as passata, is the name given to tomatoes that have been passed through a food mill made especially for the task called a passapomodoro or ‘tomato passer’” Nancy writes in The Mozza Cookbook. 

Often made during tomato season in Italy (usually toward the end of summer), when the red fruit is ripe and everywhere, families might spend a few days passing tomatoes through a food mill to fill up bottles of fresh tomato sauce that go into their larder for the rest of the year. Though passata di pomodoro is usually not cooked, Nancy and her team at Mozza like to cook the tomatoes for a half hour on the stove top to thicken the sauce and concentrate the flavours. 

If it’s not tomato season where you are, we recommend using canned tomatoes, preferably San Marzanos. The good news is this sauce freezes phenomenally well, so you can have passata di pomodoro all year round.