Roasted Tomato & Garlic Passata

With a kilo or more of tomatoes coming from the greenhouse every day, I have yet another ingredient to think of using, I'm not complaining. I decided to make some passata using my mouli or food mill. It's an old fashioned kitchen implement perhaps but invaluable for some specific uses. Tomato seeds when blitzed in a blender or food processor tend to make the finsihed product bitter, so rendering the roasted tomatoes and garlic into a delicious slurry is best done by using a mouli.

For this recipe you will need;
2 kilos of ripe tomatoes
1 head of garlic
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 teaspoons of sea salt flakes
1 teaspoon of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper

Cut the tomatoes up roughly and place in a large flat ovenproof dish. Peel the cloves of garlic and cut each clove in half. Sprinkle on the olive oil and seasoning and place in a hot oven, 200C, ideally with a grill function, for 30 to 45 minutes. Take the dish out of the oven after 15 minutes and move the ingredients around to expose more surfaces to the heat.

When the tomatoes and cooked, allow to cool a little before putting them along with the cooking juices through the mouli. Place in a jar and keep in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze in a suitable container.
This passata is delicious served as a soup, hot or chilled, it also provides the perfect tomato base for a sauce, it even forms the perfect tomato topping for a pizza.

Notes:
A mouli is certainly a piece of kitchen equipment worth investing in, but you can achieve a similar result by pressing the roasted tomatoes through a medium sieve, doing this a couple of times will get you looking for a mouli pretty quickly.
If you find the garlic is getting a little too brown, simply hide the cloves under the pieces of tomato.