Peter Vicinio

An information technology professional with more than two decades of experience, Peter Vicinio spends his time outside of work engaged in numerous extracurricular activities. Peter Vicinio was raised in a very traditional Italian family and enjoys partaking in Italian culinary traditions. Notably, he refers to sauce as "gravy," the term by which it is traditionally known by most first- and second-generation Italians in the United States. On an annual basis, he purchases a minimum of at least four crates of New Jersey grown San Marzano tomatoes, the primary ingredient in his celebrated gravy. Peter Vicinio prepares his equipment in advance by cleaning and sanitizing it for production. Working side by side, his family cleans and cuts the batch of tomatoes.

Peter Vicinio's two young daughters, Victoria and Isabella, take charge of meticulously washing approximately two hundred pounds of tomatoes. The next step in the process involves blanching all the tomatoes. After the skins are loosened in the blanching process, the tomatoes are run through a tomato grinding machine which removes the skins and seeds. The tomato juice is then put in to a 80-quart pot where it is boiled to perfection. Simultaneously, the jars are boiled in a separate 60-quart pot to sterilize them.

The next stage involves filling each jar with the boiling hot sauce, adding an assortment of New Jersey-grown basil and seasonings, and placing a lid and screw top band on each jar. The final step is to submerge each tomato-filled jar into a boiling pot of water to ensure that the lid seals properly when the jar cools. The Vicinio family then looks forward to many months of pasta topped with their delicious homemade gravy.