SOURCING the sauce

I first met Bart, better known as Nonno Bart, on a work shoot.

Stories of 3am wake ups to watch his home team Napoli, homemade wine, limoncello, and a few espressos scattered throughout the day were enough to make me long for retirement.

Rewind a few years.

A Friday morning with the sun just creeping up. We’re floating at the Bombie in Gordon’s Bay, about to swim back to Clovelly.

The stretch of water in between feels different.

Darker. Deeper. Slightly more mysterious

The bottom drops off, seeming to open beneath you.

Unsettlingly, your mind wanders.

All of a sudden, I’m keen to get back to dry land. Over coffees later, we share in this same irrational unease over our now incorrectly named Marinara Trench.

Since then, the Crusties have grown.

More people. Less fear.

And the trench doesn’t feel quite so…trenchy.

But, never ones to let a joke go, I now find myself back at Bart’s not-so-humble abode – this time by order of the Crusties.

After a week of frenzied calls and messages – scrambling to secure tomatoes and jars to beat the end-of-season tomato cut off, a deadline I never thought I’d lose sleep over, we managed to secure 5 crates of Roma tomatoes, 100 shipped from Melbourne, and one very patient Italian man to teach us his ways.

Call time is 7am. I arrive just after. He asks why I’m late. Bart’s already been working since 5am. Napoli have comfortably beaten Cagilari 1-0. He’s had his espresso. A full crate of tomatoes, washed, peeled and cut, is already done.

I’ve been there for three minutes, holding a camera, and I already feel like a piece of shit. Bart has a rare ability to make you feel both incredibly useless without offending you in the slightest. A quality only the older generation of skilled, knowledgeable migrants can possess.

“Now we start” he says.

He shows me how to wash the jars – a simple task of rinsing the jars to relieve them of any dust. By the time he’s finished his tutorial, he’s cleaned the entire box.

My hands are still dry.

To my rescue, the rest of the Crusties arrive, and are quickly assigned jobs. Dom and Charlie are placed on tomato washing duty, whilst Josh is given the “usually reserved for children” job of washing and placing basil in the ‘washed-by-Bart-definitely-not-Jack’ jars.

Now we’re moving. As the tomatoes boil away in the giant pot, Bart declares a rest. His wife Lena appears with a spread of espresso and homemade cakes. We eat, we drink, we rest. Now we sta–– “Grappa?” she asks. Hard to say no to an Italian family at 9am. And so we drink.

“Now we start”.

Tomatoes boiled, they are transferred over to the garage, where, alongside the 100l barrel of wine he’d made the day prior, we begin the task of churning them into a deliciously thick, rich tomato sauce.

And so the tomatoes get squeezed.

And again.

And again.

By now, the sun had fully blanketed the workstation. Bart, majestically perched on his jarring stool, guided us through the next phase: bottling.

“And now… we start.”

The tutorial resumed. Eighty jars later, each filled (mostly by Bart) with sauce and sealed tight, we made one final trip back to the giant pot. Lined with planks of wood, the jars of red gold were lowered in with Bart’s signature care — a job we definitely weren’t trusted enough to handle ourselves — ready to be boiled, preserved, and eventually enjoyed.

“And now, we’re done. Finito.”

And just like that, the Marinara Trench Sauce was born.

Triple squeezed. Handmade. Italian.

Looking back wistfully, and mostly to sound contemplative for the sake of a blog, the Marinara Trench may not have been that deep, it just felt like it was.

These days, with more people and more noise, it doesn’t have the same edge.
But the name stuck. And like most things with the Crusties, it escalated.

And now, somehow, and for some reason, it exists in jars.

Made by a group of half-capable swimmers who are always running late,
under the watchful eye of a man who is always early.

No rushing. No cutting corners. No faffing. Just good sauce.

Now we start.