The Tomato Mill
There are around 25 tomato plants in the dome which are now starting to generate ripe tomatoes (photo one) so we thought it was a good time to make a batch of tomato sauce. In the past that has been kind of a fiddly procedure because you had to cut them up and remove the seeds by hand and you had to scald them and then take the skins off. This year we purchased a tomato mill from Lee Valley which was actually made - wait for it - in Italy not China. Wow. I had heard about tomato mills some years ago but had never seen one in operation.
The procedure is to put the tomatoes in boiling water for about five minutes (photo two) to soften them up and loosen the skins. Small ones then went directly into the hopper (photo three) while larger ones were cut in half or quarters then went into the hopper. The white impeller in the middle of the hopper has two "wings", not visible in the photo, which mash up the tomatoes and press them against a stainless steel screen below the impeller.
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| 1. Tomatoes from the dome | 2. Scalding | 3. The hopper |
To process the tomatoes you turn the crank which rotates the impeller. Everything but the seeds and skins go through the screen (photo four), down the white chute and into the white bowl. The seeds and skins are ejected out the smaller red chute and into a container, in this case a metal bread pan which we pressed into service. After the first pass the rejected seeds and skins are still pretty wet but the deal is to put them through the press twice more, getting more tomato out of them each time. After the third pass (photo 5) the seeds and skins are only a small fraction of what you started with and are relatively dry. The resulting tomato sauce (photo 6) we eventually turned into a pasta sauce with the addition of local grass-fed hormone-free beef and assorted vegetables and herbs from the garden. Some we ate over GF spaghetti for supper, the rest went in the freezer to use over the winter. Yum!
This tomato mill is probably one of the best things we have ever purchased. At about $40 it was not expensive, it is easy to use, it does exactly what what it claims to do, it processes the tomatoes quickly, it doesn't make a big mess and it is easy to clean. Now we are looking forward to more ripe tomatoes to process.
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| 4. :Processing | 5. Seeds and skins | 6.Final sauce |