Just a small selection of this week's bounty. |
Following last year’s ‘What to do with all those courgettes’ post, I thought I’d do the same with tomatoes – except this
time with more of a plea for ideas.
Here’s what we normally do with all our toms:
Eating fresh and uncooked
We eat lots of lovely fresh tomato salads,
obviously. This tomato and pomegranate molasses salad from Sabrina Gayhour’s Persiana
cookbook is one of my favourites. I’m also very partial to eating a just-picked
tomato, still warm from the sun, cut in half and sprinkled with crunchy Maldon
salt. Heaven.
Bruschetta. Skin and
deseed the tomatoes, then dice. Mix with chopped garlic, torn basil, olive oil,
salt and pepper, and serve on thick slices of toasted (good-quality) bread,
drizzled with more oil on top.
This spicy tomato and pepper dip (Ezme)
is delicious with bread and other dips, like cacik.
Gazpacho. This
cold tomato and cucumber soup is perfect on a baking-hot day, served with
giant fried croutons on the side. We use the recipe in our old Moro cookbook,
but this Felicity Cloake version looks pretty similar. Eat and think of Red
Dwarf (Dwarfers will get it).
Cooking with tomatoes
Thinking about it, in the summer, we mostly
use our tomatoes fresh and uncooked. When we do cook with tomatoes, it tends to
be a simple pasta sauce, with skinned, chopped tomatoes, basil and
garlic. Or I’ll sometimes make this tomato and sourdough soup from
Ottolenghi, if we’ve got more tomatoes than we know what to do with.
Cooking with tomatoes tends to be a winter
thing for us. In which case, we use our processed, frozen tomatoes. Which
brings me to…
Preserving for the winter
We don’t bottle our tomatoes (i.e. preserve in
jars, with all that heat-processing malarkey), because I’m still scared of dying
from botulism. (Although, I don’t know why. We bottled and heat-processed some peaches
last summer and they were both delicious and non-lethal.)
Instead, we cook a massive batch of tomatoes
down, say, once a week – without faffing around with skinning or deseeding
first, just roughly chop and bung them in a big-ass pan. Simmer until the
mixture has reduced down to a consistency that’s perfect for stews, curries,
soups, etc. This takes an hour or two, depending on how much mixture you’ve got
in the pan, size of pan, and so on. Then we blend it up and sieve off the skin
and seeds. And voila, homemade passata. We ladle the passata into food bags (each
bag being enough for one batch of soup or stew or whatever), label the bags and
store in the freezer. You’re probably only supposed to keep this sort of stuff
in the freezer for a few months, but we have no problems storing frozen passata
for up to a year.
Rob also makes tomato ketchup every year (using this recipe, but doubled). It’s runnier than shop-bought ketchup, but
very tasty.
Every couple of years, I also make some chutney
with tomatoes, apples, pears, onions and various spices (sometimes dates, too).
But we so rarely eat chutney, I’ve still got jars on the shelf that are years’
old. Let’s just say there’s no need to make chutney this year…
I'm also toying with the idea of drying tomatoes in the sun, then storing in oil. Anyone done this?
I'm also toying with the idea of drying tomatoes in the sun, then storing in oil. Anyone done this?
What do you do with your tomatoes? What tomato
recipes couldn’t you live without? And what’s your favourite way to preserve
all that sunshine for the winter?