This is a quick photo review of the Weston Roma Food Strainer and Sauce Maker. It includes some close-up  photos along with some of our thoughts.

We had a chance to use one of these last summer. Mike graciously offered to loan us his when he found out that our tomatoes ripened all at one time. We were totally impressed!

This machine is designed to separate the pulp and juice from the rest of the tomato (or fruit) and direct the “good stuff” through a strainer and into a bowl while the seeds and rind are ejected out the front of the cone. This is the basic model that comes with the single strainer. Roma offers an upgrade with several strainers for fruits and berries. They also have a motor attachment if you don’t want to crank by hand.

We ordered ours through Amazon (link below) and it arrived in 3 days via UPS. This is what the package included:

It was nicely packaged. All items were accounted for and each piece is packaged neatly into it’s own bag. Word of caution: keep an eye open for the small parts!

The parts appear to be durable and well-made. The only part that gave us any trouble when we installed it was the clear plastic cone that fits on the front of the strainer. It seems a little weak and could possibly crack if overtightened.

As you can see below that the main housing unit is also the stand. It is polished aluminum and the manufacturer did an excellent job of machining and polishing. I could spot no flaws at all. We have a Weston cereal mill that looks very rough but this piece is very nice.

You can see in the photos above that the stand has a suction cup anchoring system. I’ve read a few individual reviews that mentioned that this method doesn’t work very well. I had no problems with it. In fact, the counter that it’s shown on above has a slight texture to it and the stand is solidly attached. Weston also supplies a C-clamp if it’s needed.

We used one of these strainers last summer with outstanding results. In years past, we have used several methods of processing our tomatoes and they all took hours of work and usually meant boiling water. This machine turned a 4 hour task into a quick 1/2 hour chore. The suction cup did just fine… it held tight while cranking through a bushel of tomatoes. I will never go back to the old way as long as one of these is available!

We’ll be doing a follow-up article or video as soon as we use it this summer.

Ben

Here’s the item on Amazon: