Kitchen Gadgetry: Roma Food Strainer & Sauce Maker

All cooks love their gadgets, and everybody has their favorites. I have seasonal as well as absolute favorites, and right now, when we're drowning in tomatoes and tomatillos, the one that comes to the fore is the Roma food strainer/sauce maker.



Before I owned this thing, processing our pounds and pounds of tomatoes for sauce was a tedious business - blanch, peel, seed, chop, cook, repeat- a manual, batch process that took up to four hours depending on the volume of tomatoes. Then one day Jennifer was talking to a friend of hers, who said "Why don't you get a food strainer?"

"A what?" was my first response. Then I looked it up on Amazon. I was sceptical at first - what do you mean I don't have to peel or seed anything any more? But it was worth a shot...



The principle behind the gadget is very simple. There's a hopper on top that feeds fruit (quartered or halved for best results) into a horizontal body. Inside this horizontal body is a plastic spiral encased in a metal mesh screen. A hand crank turns the spiral, which pushes the fruit or vegetables from the hopper through the screen. The pulp and juice go through the holes in the mesh, and the white splash guard directs the results into a conveniently placed bowl, while the skins, seeds and core continue along the spiral and are dumped out the waste chute at the end. The whole thing can be attached to the counter either by a vacuum seal (the white handle in the picture above) or by a clamp.

The first time I used this thing, it was a revelation. It literally took 75% less time and effort to process about 200 tomatoes- from rinsing to starting cooking the sauce was one hour, not four. Since then, the novelty has worn off a bit, but the utility hasn't - here's a shot from this weekend, making tomatillo sauce.



There are only two caveats I would note about this thing: one is that you have to get the splash guard positioned correctly or it will drip all over your counter; the other is that the plastic cone the waste ejects through is no sturdier than a plastic picnic glass and prone to cracking if roughly handled. I ended up breaking my original one and ordering replacements.

The base unit, which comes with one fine-mesh screen, costs about $40, and there's an add-on package with three additional screens and a "grape spiral" for processing small fruit. I think that was about $20. All told, though, this is one of the most efficient purchases I've ever made for my kitchen, and I'd recommend it to anyone with lots of any kind of fruit or vegetable to process.