How tomatoes down the drain got up my nose

Why one chef's wasteful use of tinned tomatoes made me mad. And an Italian chef explains why you should never wash tinned tomatoes or chuck the juice, and how to make the best of cheap tinned ones.

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There’s a lot of weird food stuff on social media as we all know but a week or so back a chef did something on a hugely popular recipe platform that made me double take. And then I got cranky. 

In a reel purporting to demonstrate how to make a superlative roast tomato pasta sauce, they tipped six tins of tomatoes into a colander, drained the juice down the sink, then rinsed them to ensure all that pesky red liquid was gone. Actually washed them under running water!

Despite my better judgement (because we all know it’s a course of action that rarely ends well) I made a polite but ironic comment on the post. “Tell me you didn’t wash that tomato sauce down the drain. Tell me you carefully saved it and used it in something else.”

The chef replied he used the juice to make Bloody Marys, a baffling claim because – as others also pointed out – we’d just watched him chuck it away. 

Then, inevitably, someone told me to '“chill”. “It’s watery tomato juice from a tin,” they sneered. “It’s hardly the worst food waste.” Really? So, a storm in a tomato tin? I don’t think so. Not when more than 1 million subscribers to this platform were being encouraged to throw away perfectly good food (and during a supposed tomato shortage in the UK).

Actually, more than 75 other people ‘liked’ my comment, and many of them questioned why decoupling the tomatoes from their juicy bath was even necessary. After all, the sauce was going into the oven for two hours, which would have reduced all that irritating juice into a tasty essence. 

The chef explained (to someone else, he was ignoring me by now) that he washed the tomatoes to ensure the “flesh to juice ratio was just right”. 

“Reducing the juice with the tomatoes makes it taste a bit like a ‘tin’ if that makes sense,” he said. Actually, it doesn’t make sense to me at all. Good seasoning and careful cooking can address this, in my humble opinion. But I turn to Carla Tomasi for expert advice. A highly experienced Rome-based Italian chef¹, her knowledge of Italian food and cookery is as vast as her generosity in sharing it. 

I know there are dishes that call for naked tinned tomatoes stripped of their juice, but what are they? Carla explained that tinned tomatoes are sometimes drained when their purpose is for something other than thickening a sauce or stew, for instance, when you want to turn them into a ‘chutney-like’ consistency.

“There’s a Sicilian soup called macco di fava, which is a very plain dried broad bean soup, flavoured just with salt, olive oil and maybe a little bit of rosemary,” she says. “Sometimes it’s garnished with a bit of tomato and some olive oil and chilli and salt, just to add a little bit of flavoured bite. Think of think of it as an Italian tarka.”

Sometimes, in the winter when fresh tomatoes are unavailable, strips (fillets) of drained tinned San Marzano tomatoes are used in a pasta sauce called filetto di pomodoro. This type of tinned tomato is expensive due to the processes involved in skinning, gutting and slicing them. But the result is very delicious.

“It’s a favoured sauce in parts of southern Italy,” Carla says. “You warm up olive oil, garlic and basil and throw in those strips of San Marzano tomatoes. You quickly and gently heat them up and then toss your pasta with it. And that's really considered a delicacy.”

But no Italian home cook or chef would EVER throw away the juice from tinned tomatoes, she says. Rather, they would store it in the fridge or freezer to use in a sauce or enhance the flavour and colour of minestrone down the track. 

If you’re not cooking Italian food, there are infinite uses for the juice, of course. Add it to any soup or stew, stir through fried or boiled rice, add to pancake batter or savoury muffins, reduce down to serve with eggs ... or add celery salt, lots of pepper, tabasco and vodka (or not) and have a good slurp.

“The notion of wasting food is so alien to me I just can't believe that somebody could do that, especially a chef, especially nowadays when everybody's geared up for total no waste in a commercial kitchen or even a domestic kitchen,” Carla says of throwing the juice away.

But what about washing those tomatoes to remove the ‘tinned’ taste? “You cannot wash away the bad ‘tinned’ taste of low quality tomatoes,” Carla says. “But I do understand that tinned tomatoes can be expensive, especially in the UK.”

To get around this, she suggests using a really good olive oil in the dish if possible and making an excellent soffrito base for the tomatoes. “There is always a way of making them taste good,” Carla says. “But washing them? That’s a washout. Wasting food is not on, no matter how you do it, and especially bad to brag about it. Nothing good comes out of wasting food.”

1. Note: Carla runs EXCEPTIONAL series of Long Table events were she cooks for cosy intimate groups in Rome. Please check her Instagram grid for details.

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