Published with permission from LuxuryWeb Magazine
New Jersey boasts some of the finest farmer’s markets, offering an excellent source of fresh produce for both home and professional cooks, especially the locally grown vegetables. As someone who must have been Neapolitan in a previous life, my love for pasta with tomato sauce, meatballs with tomato sauce, seafood with tomato sauce, and Greek pastitsio is boundless — anything drenched in tomato sauce captivates me!
At the recent Summer Fancy Food Show, I discovered Hoboken Farms, a New Jersey company crafting exceptional Marinara, Vodka Sauce, Basil Marinara, and Low Sodium Marinara. These high-quality, chunky tomato-based sauces are simply delightful.
Living in Northern New Jersey, I chuckled at the idea of a farm in Hoboken, a town without working farms for at least a century. Hoboken is better known as the site of the first recorded baseball game, the birthplace and early home of Frank Sinatra, and the location of Stevens Institute of Technology.
Initially sold at assorted farmers’ markets, Hoboken Farm products are now available in four jarred tomato sauce varieties at Princeton area ShopRite stores, Whole Foods Markets, and 30 weekly farmers markets across New Jersey and New York. They are also seasonally available on Amazon in 2-jar packs. You can purchase the sauces directly from their website and have them shipped to your home at no extra cost if you don’t live near Princeton.
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In my kitchen, I used these sauces to cook several dishes. If I didn’t know they came from a jar, I would have thought they were made by an Italian grandmother. That’s exactly how a good tomato sauce made by a nonna should taste.
RELATED: Bucatini all’Amatriciana: A Taste of Italian Comfort
I started with bucatini all’Amatriciana, following a recipe I acquired 50 years ago from Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia, a renowned Michelin-starred restaurant in Milan. Using the Marinara, I added a sofrito of white onion, garlic, thinly sliced red peppers, and sliced guanciale, all sautéed in olive oil. The marinara, made with Jersey-grown heirloom tomatoes, high-quality olive oil, onion, garlic, and other aromatics, combined with the smoked pork cheek and extra aromatics, perfectly replicated the taste I remembered from Milan.
Next, I used the Vodka Sauce on a dish of penne rigate, simply sprinkling some grated Parmigiano on top. With a pizza stone for my oven, I made my own Pizza Margherita using the Basil Marinara. I topped the thin, homemade New York-style pie with fresh mozzarella and basil leaves to achieve the red, white, and green colors of the Italian flag.
According to the story I heard during a visit to Naples, the Pizza Margherita originated in 1889 when the Capodimonte Palace asked the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito at Pizzeria Brandi to create a pizza in honor of Queen Margherita. The freshness of the basil leaves placed whole on top of the mozzarella and sauce, along with misting the pie, preserved the green color and made the crust crispy.
For the final jar, the Low Sodium Marinara, I recreated a dish frequently encountered in Western Tuscany’s Maremma region: “Pici-al-Ragu-Di-Cinghiale.” This handmade pasta dish, covered with a ragù of wild boar meat, is popular as a revenge dish for the damage wild boars cause to vineyards. Even though wild boar meat isn’t available in New Jersey, the chunks of pork shoulder I used for the ragù were fantastic.
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