How to Make Conserva
When I researched my tomato piece for SFist, I was intrigued by the conserva described in Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand (reviewed here—holy cow!—two years ago). A way to spend hours cooking something you can buy in a store? I'm so there. Because conserva is essentially homemade tomato paste, though it's much better than the little can of Hunt's you'll find at the market. Conserva's flavor is deep and complex, a tomato reduced to its purest, richest, form. Make it now, while the season's still in swing!
As with many slow-cooked dishes, the technique is simple. Preheat the oven to 300°. Dice five pounds of tomatoes into medium-sized chunks. Make sure they taste good, but any subtle flavors will be lost on the way to conserva, so don't worry about buying heirloom, etc. varieties. An affordable, ripe basic tomato works well.
Now you'll need a big, shallow sauté pan. Pour a little olive oil into the pan, and bring it up to a medium heat. Boil the tomatoes, with a pinch of salt, for about two minutes.
Pour everything into a food mill outfitted with the smallest disc and set over a big bowl (you may need to do this in batches). Process the tomatoes through the food mill. Pour the contents of the bowl into a "large" jelly roll pan (a half sheet pan, for those who think in restaurant terms). For our pan, the tomato pulp and liquid came perilously close to brimming over.
Carefully, put the pan in the oven. Cook for four to five hours, stirring the mixture every hour, until the paste is dry. A dough scraper makes this fairly easy. You'll notice the mixture get thicker and thicker.
Now choose: Do as Bertolli suggests and cook at 250° for another two and a half hours, only to find a blackened, unusable mess on the jelly roll pan, or remove the paste from the oven as I did on my second attempt.
Let the conserva cool to room temperature and scoop it into a jar. My yield was on the order of one-half cup. That's right: five pounds of tomatoes reduced to one-half cup. Smooth the conserva surface, and top off with one-half inch of olive oil. Bertolli says you can keep it at room temperature indefinitely, but I put mine in the refrigerator and pulled it out a few hours before I used it.
What can you do with it? Use in any recipe that calls for tomato paste. I put two generous dollops of mine into the risotto we made for the cat sitter dinner, and I used another spoonful in the sauce for the braised ribs I made for the wine class I catered recently.
Technorati tags: food & drink | how-to | tomatoes
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