If your pantry is stocked right, it may look lean but is a good partner in your meal making. The key is to stock up with carefully selected basics, building blocks of many recipes. POMI tomatoes from Italy are a pantry mainstay. Fresh tomatoes in a carton. No kidding. Nothing else. Ingredients include one item, and you guessed it---TOMATOES! Isn't that refreshing?100% tomatoes, all natural, no preservatives, no water added, no sodium added, no fat, no citric acid, no nothing. If you like tomatoes instead of canned tomatoes laced with high fructose corn syrup, natural flavor, calcium chloride, citric acid, buy the POMI brand. And to top it off, the product contains the good part of the tomato (imagine that?), leaving out the core, the seeds and the skin. The carton I purchased today is good for a year. Fresh, no preservatives but lasts unrefrigerated for a year? Hmmmmm. It is actually possible due to the technology and practices of Parmalet, the manufacturer of POMI. Parmalet, a world leader in long life milk production and a leading food producer in Italy in 1961 adapted this technology to the packaging of fresh chopped tomatoes. But, I thought, time is time and fresh is fresh so how do the tomatoes taste so good coming from a carton?
How can my sauces and soups taste so good when I use POMI as if I used tomatoes from the stand? Apparently, POMI tomatoes are packaged only once a year, in the summer from the tomato crop that is fully ripe and harvested after this crop has enjoyed the intense summer sun. The harvest area is in Italy, Parma, where POMI is packaged, and is known worldwide for their centuries old traditions in food production. What I found intriguing is that this area prides itself on providing to the world-- typical, normal, everyday food products that are of the highest quality available. Proudly unpretentious!
At the belist, you may know, we promote the "new-old" as a method to a healthy and green life. We recommend modern products that use traditional time tested methods. POMI is a belist favorite. (We do not receive any financial benefit or payment for saying that.) If you have POMI products on hand, you can make a quick marinara sauce, a base for chili and soups (thinking minestrone right now) as well as many Italian casserole dishes. Now, like you, I want to make everything from scratch including my tomato sauce but simply can't. So I rely upon products that are as close to the source as possible. I am not sure that you can get much closer than POMI unless you have fresh tomatoes. And from a cost standpoint, I paid $2.39 for approximately 26 ounces of POMI Chopped tomatoes versus $2.99 for a pound of somewhat anemic looking vine-ripe tomatoes. The POMI is the better deal and gets you one step closer to getting dinner prepared. Many online groceries have good deals on POMI products and you can buy a sizable quantity to spread out the shipping costs.
I would love to hear about your recipes where POMI is a must. Talk to you then. Try It! http://www.thebelist.com is my website.
Comments
Leave a comment