How To Avoid Malaria While Making Tomato Sauce: A Primer

I will now attempt the lowest form of internet content. No, not pictures of cats.

There is a circle of intertunnel hell below the feline meme zone: recipes. Only taking pictures of restaurant food while on vacation ranks lower. But by golly, I’m wading into this pool. I’m going to teach you how to make roasted garlic tomato sauce. Why? Because I had to learn how to do it, and misery loves company.

I’m in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. They’ve heard of Italians. Rumors, mostly. The local idea of Italian food drifts into the orange sauce category. We’ve always lived in the blood red culinary world. Other than jarred Prego, they don’t cater to anyone who wishes to cook Italian food at home. Their ground tomatoes come in a little box, about the size of your child’s juice box. If you make tomato sauce using it as an ingredient, it comes out with the flavor, texture, and color of off-brand bark mulch after a heavy rain.

It’s also nearly impossible to find things like ricotta cheese, pecorino romano cheese, or blocks of mozzarella cheese. They have their own cheese here, called manchego, and they like it better than they like me, I guess, so we have to make do. But we got weary of bad tomato sauce, and pledged to do better.

It’s interesting to note that Mexicans basically invented the tomato. They grew wild in the Andes (tomatoes, not Mexicans), but it was Mexicans who first cultivated them as a crop in a serious way. When the various conquistador types showed up looking for free-range doubloons, they discovered tomatl, and brought them back to Europe. I assume an Italian eventually stole some from Spain, because I’m Italian, and that’s how we roll, and the rest is history, and pizza.

So Roma tomatoes are grown everywhere here, called jitomate Roma, and they’re terrific. They’re not particularly Mexican, though, or Italian, or European of any stripe. They are grown here, but they’re the result of modern plant breeding in the USA. At any rate, with inexpensive, easy to find tomatoes available all over our city, I should be able to make tomato sauce. Then again, I should be able to understand differential equations, since I was taught them in school. I can’t recall what the drive train in a car has to do with math with letters in it, so don’t count on cheating off me in class. But I can make a fairly credible tomato sauce equation.

So here goes: first, go to the Santiago marketplace and get some tomatoes. We’re feeding four people, so get 18 or 20 of them.

If you’re new to the cooking game, I suppose I should mention the tomatoes are on the right. The fruits on the left are called limes. These are important. I don’t want you to get malaria, so mix the gin you see in the background with quinine water and put a slice of lime in it. I swear by it. I drank it in Maine all the time, and never got malaria.

Now cut the tomatoes in half lengthwise, and nip out the belly button from the stem.

If you haven’t had your gin yet, put your delirium tremens to work for you and drizzle some olive oil on your metal baking tray in a wild pattern.

With all your tomatoes face down, like a keg party at 3 AM, get a bunch of garlic and a big cebolla (white onion), slice them up, and toss them willy nilly on the tomatoes. The willy nilly arrangement adds zest, I guess.

Salt, pepper, and pepperoncino (red pepper flakes) are the last of the ingredients, except maybe the most important one. I’ll explain that later.

We’re cooking in Merida, remember? We need an oven. Ovens are pretty scarce around here, at least in the rental house market we haunt. We have one, though. It’s about the size of a shoe box, and the dials are all marked in soccer. You need to get about 425 degrees Fahrenheit, which is something like 220 degrees C.

Put the tomatoes up high on the racks in the oven for 45 minutes. They’ll look like this:

You grab the burnt skins and pull them off, because you will have no skin in this game:

Then you build a Time Masheen and travel back in time to buy a vegetable mill on Amazon, and have it delivered to an Amazon Locker down the street because the chances of anything being delivered to your house are pretty slim.

Then you put everything from the tray into the mill, and crank. I am a crank, so I find this easy. Your mileage may vary. After a while, the good stuff is in the bowl, and you can throw away the mulch that’s left in the mill.

And here’s what you get for your trouble:

Yeah. Red, not orange. A hint of arrabbiata from the pepper flakes, roasted garlic flavor from the, you know, roasted garlic, and some sweetness from the onion. Bad jarred tomato sauces and Clemenza just dump in sugar to kill the acid, but you don’t need it if you cook this right.

Now, climb back in your Time Masheen, go back a month or two, buy a bunch of pots, fill them with semillas de albahaca grande, otherwise known as basil seeds, and wait. Because you can’t find fresh basil here to save your soul. You’ll just get the same, “You mean cilantro, senor?” from everyone. You. Need. Fresh. Basil.

Why, yes, I do get strange looks from the cleaning lady, because I don’t grow dope like a normal gringo, but by gad, we have fresh basil in our salsa tomate.