Three Italian dishes that rely on good tinned peeled tomatoes: chicken pizzaiola, orzo alla marinara and chicken cacciatora. Simple-looking food that depends on the quality of a single ingredient, and a few tips on choosing peeled tomatoes worth buying.

Some dishes look simple and in fact ask for real skill and, above all, extra care in choosing the ingredients. When you have no home-preserved peeled tomatoes to hand, the kind that families in Puglia still put up in jars at the end of summer, the next best thing is to look for the best peeled tomatoes on sale: organic ones, for instance, or tomatoes grown close to where they are packed, which in Italy is called km 0, “zero kilometres”. Both are good signs of flavour and quality.

Whole peeled tomatoes in their thick red juice in a white bowl, with a basil leaf on top

Three dishes for good peeled tomatoes

Why not treat yourself, and your guests, to a one-dish meal or a hearty main course? Here are three ideas that show off high-quality peeled tomatoes at their best.

  • Chicken pizzaiola (pollo alla pizzaiola): chicken cooked “the pizza maker’s way”, that is with the tomato that also goes on a pizza. The sauce is the whole point of the dish, so the tomatoes you choose show straight away.
  • Orzo alla marinara: in Italian orzo means barley, the grain, not the small rice-shaped pasta sold under that name abroad. Cooked “alla marinara”, the sailors’ way, it becomes a one-dish meal with the flavours of the sea, and good peeled tomatoes give it body and colour.
  • Chicken cacciatora (pollo alla cacciatora): “hunter’s style” chicken, slowly stewed in tomato. Like the pizzaiola, it is a dish where a watery, flavourless tomato has nowhere to hide.

Tomatoes are serious business in Puglia. Many families here still spend a whole day bottling the summer’s tomatoes, a ritual we describe in the day of the sauce. And if your home-made tomato sauce keeps coming out thin, read why home-made passata turns watery.

How to choose the best peeled tomatoes

However simple or elaborate your dish, whenever you want to show what you can do in the kitchen and please your guests, cook your recipes with peeled tomatoes using only high-quality ones: ideally organic, or at least grown with traditional methods that really respect the raw material. That is how you learn to tell the best peeled tomatoes apart and leave aside the poor industrial products.

In our shop you will find a selection of peeled tomatoes that are genuine Apulian specialities, quite different from what you find on supermarket shelves: products from a short supply chain, with all the proper certifications, made by Apulian firms that work in the traditional way. For more Apulian dishes built on tomato, try our meatballs in tomato sauce or the maccheroni with baked tomatoes.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login