Spotting a shiny red beauty emerge on a tomato plant is a joyous moment for the home gardener.
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For chef Guy Grossi, it's a ceremony worth bottling and for Italians, they do so on the annual day to make passata – tomato sauce for pasta.
Grossi has initiated the Melbourne Tomato Festival on March 1 as part of his "Melbournese" movement to preserve tradition and celebrate his culture.
"It all stems from the fact that making passata is a cultural day for Italians and the family comes together," Grossi said.
When the tomatoes are ripe in February, the clan gets to work with manual or electric machines to separate the seeds and skin from the liquid. Traditionally, the passata is funnelled into 750ml Carlton Draught or Victoria Bitter beer bottles, sealed with caps then boiled in 44-gallon drums. The result is pasta sauce for the next year or beyond.
You may have stared at your Italian neighbours or envied them in their concrete-paradise backyards with kitchen in the garage while they were assigned duties to cut the tomatoes, stuff segments into the machine, pour the sauce into bottles and wipe up the spillage.
Many of my fellow Generation X second-generation Italians recall the red sea splashing and seeds sticking to our cowboy-style Miller shirts. The acid from the passata made your arms excruciatingly itchy.
Anyone who travelled along Mahoneys Road in Reservoir would see road-side signs advertising boxes of Roma tomatoes. And there would be advertisements for "pomodori" in Italian newspapers.
Being a family affair, Grossi's sister, Liz Rodriguez, has helped organise the Melbourne Tomato Festival at Farm Vigano in South Morang. The passata season will be celebrated with cooking demonstrations, food stalls and guest speakers including Sicilian chef and food preservationist Fabrizia Lanza. There's bound to be an analysis of the San Marzano tomato versus the Roma.
Frank Bovezza will hold a workshop as the business development manager of Home Make It, a one-stop-shop for everything home-made with outlets in Reservoir and Clayton.
He said that in Italy, making passata was a tradition born out of necessity to save money but now it was part of the slow food movement. "People are wanting to know what's in their food," he said.
The Bovezza family reaches for the work clothes to celebrate the harvest from the garden. "Passata day is set in the calendar like Christmas and Easter." The reward after a hard day's work is a plate of pasta with freshly aromatic sauce and basil from the garden.
Judging by the customers seeking equipment and doing courses at Home Make It, different nationalities are making their own sauce and naturally, the hipsters have got their hands on a "passatutto" or food mill.
There has been a shift away from storing passata in beer bottles to clear bottles with screw tops. Especially hipster-friendly jam jars.
