The Best Way To Break Down Tomatoes For Luscious Sauces - No Food Processor Needed

Sure, you can always jazz up a store-bought tomato sauce and call it a day, but if you're looking to impress friends or fam, cooking it from scratch is the way to go. You can make quick work of breaking down the best tomatoes for a sweet pasta sauce with a handy-dandy food processor. Yet, the drawback is that, unless you perform some surgery on each veg before it goes in the appliance, you end up with seeds and skins mixed in that don't always belong. However, according to Matt Harding, the chief innovation officer at Piada Italian Street Food, there's a better tool for the job that prevents those unwanted bits from ending up in your sauce.

"I have used a box grater to shred tomatoes for sauce before," Harding said. The idea behind this method is similar to one of the secrets Italian nonnas employ for perfect sauce. While a food processor works in a pinch, Matt Harding indicated that it wouldn't be the optimal choice for someone intimately familiar with making classic Italian fare. "Any Italian Nonna worth her 72-pound weight in pasta dough is going to have a food mill to break down tomatoes for tomato sauce," he said. "So they would scoff at using a food processor." A box grater, used correctly, can work much like a food mill, allowing only the tomato's flesh to be part of the base.

Matt Harding said the key to using a box grater to grate the tomatoes is doing so mindfully, taking care to avoid including any undesired plant material, such as the skin — he likens tomato skin in a sauce to biting into a kernel of corn when eating popcorn. "I simply cut the tomatoes in half top to bottom, scoop out the seeds with my fingers, and then place the flesh side on the box grater and proceed. I use finger and hand pressure to go down to the skin but not through it, leaving the skin ungrated," Harding explained. 

A box grater may be better than some gadgets you can use to break down tomatoes, but other options might do an even better job, depending on what kind of sauce you're making. As long as you avoid the mistakes people sometimes make with a food processor, it can actually work for some sauces. Yet, for others, the most standard kitchen tool in existence will yield the best results. "For a chilled tomato soup, food mill or food processor; for a marinara, hand-crushed; for an arrabiata, knife," Harding said. The texture you're aiming for will inform which, if any, kitchen tool besides your hands is the one to employ.