Ever wondered why even a simple burrata tastes so much better at a restaurant than it does at home? Well, firstly, it’s always nice to eat something at a place that’s not your home but it also has a lot to do with the quality of the produce used. In many cases: it has everything to do with the quality of produce used. Having great ingredients in your arsenal is one way that you can make your food taste much, much better. It’s not a complicated idea and it’s one that chefs like Alice Waters have made their name by promoting in their pared-back plates of cooking.
Cirio is a company that believes in that same ingredients-first ethos. The quality of Cirio's preserves comes from the exceptional quality of the 100% Italian raw produce they source and the extreme care they take throughout the growing, picking, processing and packaging process. Simply put: your spag bol will taste better with a tin of Cirio tomatoes in it than it would with the metallic-tasting own-brand stuff. Cirio’s ripest round tomatoes are deseeded, peeled and cut into pieces to preserve the quality, consistency and intense flavour of where they come from. Fragrant and tasty, with a rich red hue, the tomatoes are picked and packed on the same day to ensure that those tomatoes taste as much like themselves – and are the best representation of a tomato – as humanly possible.
Born in 1836, Cirio’s founder Francesco Cirio began working at Torino’s Porta Palazzo fruit and vegetable market at the age of just 14 years old. Spotting a demand for fresh Italian produce from markets in London and Paris, young Francesco set up a trading company utilising transalpine shipping to Britain, and soon became Italy’s most important agricultural exporter in Piemonte. At the age of 20, Francesco Cirio became one of the first people in the world to be credited with developing and pioneering the appertization preservation technique – an innovative technique which allowed him to preserve tomatoes and other vegetables in cans to better distribute them to markets all around the world. The rest, as they say, is history. Cirio continues to be an industry leader today and all you have to do is crack open a tin of their climate-neutral chopped tomatoes to find that out for yourself.
Yes, Cirio makes tasty products but they’re also doing their bit for the planet. All of Cirio’s chopped tomatoes are climate-neutral thanks, in no small part, to the bamboo forests that Cirio invests in as part of their carbon dioxide offsetting scheme. Its mission is to produce the highest quality products in a way that is both environmentally and socially sustainable. Cirio doesn’t want to exploit their land or pollute it with chemicals or additives. And I’m sure you don’t want to be eating tomatoes that are coated in chemicals or additives, either. Buying Cirio is a sensible choice to make.