Tomatoes, salt, sugar, pepper, olive oil and some time on the stove top are all you need to make world-renowned chef, 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. 

This dish is 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 to  put in their larder for the rest of the year. Though passata di pomodoro is usually not cooked, Nancy and her team at Mozza cook the tomatoes for a half hour on the stovetop to enhance the flavors and thicken the sauce a. 

If it’s not tomato season where you live 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.