Sabina Pesci & Michele Nardini, Le Marche. Passata

Fano, Pesaro

Sabina Pesci and Michele Nardella have a tomato farm in northern Marche. From June to September a steady stream of the freshly picked fruit are taken to the stable of the old farmhouse which has been transformed into a bright white kitchen. There the tomatoes are plunged into boiling water, drained to get rid of their watery juices and put through a metre-wide mill to separate the skins from the passata, a thick, dense sauce that contains 2.5kg of tomatoes in every 500ml bottle. After bottling with a big plastic jug it is ready to go; the whole process from picking to pasteurisation taking rarely over an hour. They farm organically on a 3 year cycle of crop rotation and grow a variety of low yielding plum tomato. The seedlings come from Puglia and their main fear is that the nursery will stop seeding such an unproductive fruit, however fabulous the flavour