§ 01 — Since 2014, mostly on purpose
A kitchen
on Nassau
Avenue.
Six kettles, eleven people, one loading dock that floods when it rains hard. Everything we sell is cooked here, forty gallons at a time, from produce that was about to be thrown away.
§ 02 — The beginning, which was not a plan
In September 2013 a farmer in Ulster County offered us four hundred pounds of tomatoes for nothing, on the condition that we came and took them that afternoon. They were beautiful. They were also split down the shoulder, which meant no distributor would touch them.
We cooked them in a rented commissary kitchen over two nights, jarred a hundred and eighty units, and sold them at a market in Greenpoint the following Saturday. They were gone by eleven. The next week the farmer called again, and this time we insisted on paying full price — which he argued about, because he had already written the crop off.
That argument is more or less the business. A farm that can sell its seconds plants again in spring. A farm that cannot, does not. Roughly a fifth of the tomatoes grown in the Northeast fail a cosmetic grade that has nothing to do with how they taste, and most of that gets disked back into the soil while the same supermarkets truck tomatoes up from Florida.
The farms
We buy from thirty-four growers across New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Most are between four and sixty acres. We commit to volume in February, before anything is in the ground, and we take the crop whatever it looks like in August — which is the part that actually matters to a farmer.
Nobody here is certified anything, in the sense that we do not carry a marketing seal. Twenty-six of the thirty-four are certified organic and the rest use organic practice without paying for the paperwork, which is a reasonable decision on forty acres.
§ 03 — Method, such as it is
Open kettle.
Long time.
Nothing added.
Tomatoes arrive whole and go into a cold-break line the same day — usually within eighteen hours of picking. They are milled or crushed depending on the recipe, then cooked in open 40-gallon kettles until enough water has left that the sugar can be tasted.
There is no purée concentrate, no tomato paste standing in for cook time, and no added sugar in any recipe we make, including the ketchup. Salt is the only correction, and it is added at the end by someone tasting the batch, not by a spec sheet.
What this costs us is consistency. A June jar is bright and sharp; a late-September jar is dark and thick and almost sweet. We print the batch on the lid so you can see which one you have. People notice, and then they start ordering by month.
§ 04 — Said about us
Press
“A jar that tastes like the month it was made in.”
“The best argument yet that ugly produce is a marketing problem, not a farming one.”
“Their vodka sauce should not work without cream. It does.”
Shipping
Orders leave Brooklyn on Tuesdays. Ground shipping runs $7.50 flat and is free over $59. Glass is heavy and we would rather not pretend otherwise — the flat rate is subsidised, and the $59 threshold is roughly where we stop losing money on it.
Everything travels in moulded straw board, not foam. In the eleven years we have been doing this the breakage rate is under half a percent, and if yours is the unlucky jar we replace it without asking for a photograph.
Returns
If you do not like it, tell us what you did not like and we will refund it. We do not need the jar back — shipping a half-eaten jar of sauce across three states helps nobody. We do read every note, and two of our recipes exist because someone complained specifically enough.
Wholesale
We supply about ninety independent shops and forty restaurants in the Northeast. Minimum is one case, terms are net 30 after the first order, and there is no exclusivity clause because we do not think that is a reasonable thing to ask a corner store for.
Write to wholesale@simmerstreet.com and Dana will send the sheet.
Visiting
The kitchen door on Nassau Avenue is open Friday afternoons from one until four. There is no tour and no tasting room — there is a folding table, whatever came off the line that morning, and usually someone willing to argue about salt.
Once a month
What came
off the line.
Short, occasionally late, never a countdown timer.
Right now
Golden heirlooms from Sparrow Lane, batch 617. Low acid, high sugar, a nuisance to peel, worth it.
Pouring Thursday