North Jersey man using family recipe for pasta sauce, available at these local stores

WAYNE — The fleshy scarlet red fruit that grows on a vine is, to practically everyone, nothing more than a tomato.

But to Tommaso Antonino Aiello, a township resident, it is a way of life.

He makes his own pasta sauce from scratch before jarring it and selling it by the caseload to area markets and to friends across the country and throughout the world. Only the choicest fruit — it is a fruit, right? — will plop into the commercial-grade pot that he uses to prepare four sauce varieties at a kitchen on Utter Avenue in Hawthorne.

What sets his sauce apart from the competition is not only the ingredients, he said, but the history. His recipe is a family secret handed down for generations. It was brought to the U.S. when his great-grandmother, Mariantonia Gatto Aiello, emigrated from Serrata, a commune in the Calabria region of southern Italy, in August 1929, settling first with her husband in Newark and then in Nutley.

The label wrapped around each 24-ounce jar of Aiello’s sauce bears her likeness and her name: Nonna Mariantonia.

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“I keep it as simple as possible, which is what my family always did,” said Aiello, 31, a 2009 graduate of Wayne Hills High School and an alumnus of the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu, a cooking academy headquartered in Paris. “This isn’t something that I just whipped up one day. This is deeply rooted in tradition.”

The original sauce has six ingredients: tomatoes, fresh basil, water, olive oil, sea salt and ground black pepper.

Aiello said he uses that as the base for the other sauces, which include arrabbiata, with crushed red chili pepper, and marinara, with garlic, grated carrots and onions. There is also a variety with roasted eggplant, and a fifth variety being planned with porcini mushrooms.

Aiello does not harvest his own tomatoes, but he said he is very particular about where they come from. He said he will only buy premium tomatoes, grown and canned by Stanislaus Food Products of Modesto, California; the Golden State is, by far, the leading producer of tomatoes in the nation. He said he buys mega-sized tins, each weighing as much as 6½ pounds, from a restaurant supplier in South Hackensack. It is the closest that he said he can get to a San Marzano tomato, a variety of plum tomato originating from the highly fertile volcanic soil in the Sarno River valley of southern Italy.

“If you can’t use a San Marzano tomato,” Aiello said, “this is the next best thing. It’s like those tomatoes, but it’s grown in this country. And it’s just as delicious.”

Worth a special trip

Aiello’s customers appreciate his attention to detail — so much so that they said they are willing to travel hundreds of miles to pick up a case or two, or three, of his sauce.

Phyllis Bennett said she and her husband, Robert Bennett, drive from Southport, North Carolina, where the couple is now retired. They used to live in Wayne. She said they pick up a case of the sauce, which includes 12 jars, each time they visit this area. (The true reason for their bimonthly visits back home is to see their extended family — it really has nothing to do with the sauce. At least that is the story she is going with.)

Family always comes before pasta sauce, but as Bennett would attest, they are perfect together. She even joked how her Irish husband has taken a strong liking to the authentic Italian blend. She said she was raised in a Sicilian household in Elmwood Park and that Aiello’s sauce rivals her late mother’s.

“It tastes homemade,” Bennett said. “It’s such a cut above everything else in quality and taste. There’s no way that I could ever use another sauce. I’d rather eat macaroni and butter.”

Word of the sauce has spread in Bennett’s coastal community. She said she gave away several jars, and wooden spoons, to her neighbors as gifts for Christmas.

Meanwhile, the sauce conjures up decades-old memories for Cynthia Ramírez of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

As a medic in the Air Force, Ramírez was stationed in Madrid, Spain, in the years leading to the Gulf War. There was an immigrant family that operated a small Italian restaurant, she recalled.

Aiello’s sauce is just like theirs, Ramírez said, only his is better. “It definitely is the best sauce that I’ve ever had,” she added.

Aiello met many of his most loyal customers, including Bennett and Ramírez, through Facebook. He said it is hard for his products to get adequate exposure and that there have been complications in getting his sauce business, called Aiello Italian Specialties, off the ground.

Still, there have been some notable gains.

In April, Aiello’s original sauce won an award from the San Francisco-based Good Food Foundation as part of its 13th annual blind tasting. There were nearly 2,000 products entered in 18 categories.

“I’m carrying on gradually,” Aiello said. “I hope to expand the business into something big someday.”

As Aiello looks toward his future, he said he cannot help but think about the past. It is easy for him to remember being a boy, he said, when under the protective eye of his grandmother, he would be called on to stir the sauce. And it is fun to imagine the precise moment when someone in the village of Serrata stumbled on the magic formula.

“What’s special about ours is that it always held on,” Aiello said. “It was always being made.”

Aiello’s sauce is sold at A&A Fine Foods at 191 Main St. in Lincoln Park; at A&C Pork Store at 446 Chamberlain Ave. in Paterson; at Whole Foods Market at 500 Chestnut Ridge Road in Woodcliff Lake; and at Whole Foods Market at 560 Valley Road in Wayne. He also sells jars, individually or by the case, through his company’s website, aielloitalianspecialties.com.

Philip DeVencentis is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: devencentis@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ man uses great-grandmother's secret recipe for brand of pasta sauce