Capobianco

Tomatoes from a Puglian farm in the Foggia countryside, grown organically on land the family has worked for four generations.

The land came first. For four generations the Capobianco family has farmed the plain around Manfredonia, in the Foggia countryside of Puglia's north — several hundred hectares now, all of it organic, worked regeneratively so the soil is fed as much as harvested.

The plain they farm — the Tavoliere, spread flat below the Gargano — is where Puglia's summer does its most serious work. Heat, dry air, and irrigated ground: tomato country by every measure that matters, which is why the family has never needed to grow them anywhere else.

The jars are the newest chapter. Rachele and Vincenzo Capobianco — she trained in economics, he in law — came back to the farm and decided the harvest should leave it under the family's own name: picked by hand, carried to the small plant standing in the fields, and preserved the same day, so nothing travels before it is sealed.

Their signature is precision about variety. Each jar holds one tomato and is named for it — Quorum, Spyro, Trilly, Blondy, Dolly — the way a monocultivar oil names its olive. Red, orange, and yellow come off the same summer field with three different temperaments, and the label tells you which one you are holding.

What comes to Casa is that summer, sealed at its height: the passata and the hand-peeled jar for the stove, the whole trio for everything else, the sun-dried and the two sughetti for the days that allow no cooking at all.