Green tomato jam

After researching several recipes on green tomato chutney, I decided to give up on this and moved on to my trusty Larousse Gastronomique. There I found a recipe for green tomato jam, which seemed simple enough to be worth trying out. All the chutneys seemed to contain a large amount of apples and also required cooking for several hours in vinegar and I don't feel prepared to depopulate the whole village where I live. So it had to be jam.

The recipe was very brief: follow the recipe for red tomato jam, but let the green tomatoes steep for 24 h in the sugar and use perserving sugar with added pectin. The recipe for the red tomato jam says to peel the tomatoes by digging out the stalk and plunging them into boiling water for 1 minute. Now I'd seen a variant on this in a film many years ago, where in addition to removing the stalk, they also cut a small cross at the bottom of each tomato, then poured boiling water over them, left them to stand for a bit and peeled them. This is what I've been doing since I saw that and which sort of works for ripe tomatoes, but not for unripe ones, I discovered when I tried it. So first lesson learnt, the water needs to continue to boil while the tomatoes are submerged in it.

Since scalding the tomatoes didn't loosen their skins, I had to peel them with an apple peeler, which took a significant part of the evening.

Then I diced them, weighed them and stired in the same weight of sugar. Regular sugar, because that's what I had. I thought I'd add the pectin later. I had 1091 g of tomatoes and added the same amount of water. Larousse Gastronomique said to add the juice of 2 lemons for each kilo of fruit. I squeezed the life of the one lemon I had and topped up with the remaining lemon juice I had in a bottle, my guess is that wasn't quite the amount of a full lemon, but I was a bit worried the jam would be too sharp, since I assumed that unripe tomatoes won't have as much sweetness as ripe ones.

24 hours later there was a lot of liquid in the pot, a lot more than seems reasonable for making jam. But never mind.

Before beginning to cook the jam, I dug out all the little jars I've saved over the years and placed in the oven, preheated to 125 °C. I also placed a saucepan half-filled with water on the hob and brought it to a rolling boil. There I put all the lids in and left for 10 minutes before taking out and setting aside to dry. I left the oven on with the jars.

I added 2 sachets of pectin to the pot, though the instructions implied that one sachet should be enough to set 1 kg of fruit. But what happens very often when you add a powder to a liquid? The powder turns to lumps. I tried to dissolve as much of the pectin as possible, smearing the larger lumps with the back of the spoon against the wall of the pot, but most I think remained in lumps. So lesson number two - mix the pectin and the sugar well before adding to the fruit.

And onto the hob and bring to the boil. I kept stirring until I remembered that you're not supposed to do that, then I left it to bubble away. A good thing I used my large pot because the mixture swelled to at least 4 times its original volume. I did skim the fine foam that formed around the edges as best I could and a hot tip is not to throw it away, it is very tasty and I had it on toast for breakfast the next day.

After about 10 minutes, I decided it was enough, so I turned off the heat and filled up 7 small jars. I put on the lids as tightly as I could and left them to cool down. My mum turns her jam jars upside down, which forces the air up to the bottom of the jars and helps create a vacuum. But there was a lot more liquid than fruit in this jam, I didn't want to risk things running over the work surface.

And lesson number three - drain away some of the liquid from the tomatoes before mixing in the sugar so as to end up with more fruit in the jam. I'll have to think of what I can do with that liquid, maybe freeze in an ice cube tray and use for flavouring.

I haven't tried this batch of jam yet, but I did have the foam I skimmed off on toast and frankly it wasn't bad at all. A bit strange since it did have the typical tomato flavour and I associate that with savoury food, but it was still nice.

I will get myself a brie and a camembert and see how this jam works with cheeses.

But I still have lots of unripe tomatoes to deal with, so I will make another batch and implement my three lessons.

Roasted green tomato soup

This year, my lovely niece Lou went a bit mad and planted a lot of seeds and a few weeks into her gardening, she ran out of space, so she very kindly gave me 2 tomato plants, which I promptly planted in the garden, since this year's potato crop didn't really happen. The tomato plants grew and grew and outgrew the supports I'd put in for them and kept growing. They also set a lot of fruit and I mean a lot. The variety is called Tigerella because the tomatoes are red with greenish stripes, so very pretty. Taste-wise, they aren't much different from the shop-bought stuff, but Lou had warned me about that.

After what seemed like a very long wait, the first reddish blush appeared and I started picking tomatoes, leaving them on the window sill for a couple of days to redden and soften. Very soon, I was struggling to keep up, so I blended 3 batches of 400 g and froze for cooking. Then I made my tomato sauce, but allowed it to boil down and become quite thick. This went into the freezer as well with the aim to have it ready for a pizza.

Now the autumn has arrived and it's getting cold and rainy, there are still loads of tomatoes left, but they aren't going red as fast, so I've started researching recipes for green tomatoes. I found this website which collates ten different recipes. I made two jars with pickled green tomatoes that were listed there, but I increased the amount of tomatoes to fill up the jars, since the original amount of 375 g barely made it to the middle. The liquid in the recipe was way too much, but it is fairly similar to the one for the royal pickle, so I'll used it to top up there when the turshiya vegetables are ready tomorrow. In fact, this method is very similar to the turshiya. Yes, I'm using this weekend, when Lundulph is away for a couple of days, to do some pickling and prepare all the pungent liquids, along with the annual clean of the oven.

However, there seems to be no end to the green tomatoes, the plants still look full of them and I must have picked at least 4 kg this weekend. I quite like tomato soup, so I searched for green tomato soup and came across this recipe, which seemed reasonable and I had all the ingredients. It didn't seem to have enough flavourings, so here are my tweaks to it.

Ingredients

1 kg green tomatoes
2 medium sized brown onions
3 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp sunflowerseed oil
vegeta (or salt), black pepper, Korean chilli flakes
5 dl water
3 Oxo cubes chicken stock
100 g baby spinach
1 dl fresh dill
1 dl fresh tarragon
½ dl fresh basil

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220 °C.
2. Wash the tomatoes, quarter and remove the fibrous area around the stalk. Peel and cut the onions in 8 wedges. Peel and cut the garlic in smaller pieces.
3. Brush a roasting tin with the oil, add the tomatoes, onion and garlic and sprinkle with vegeta (salt), black pepper and Korean chilli flakes, then stir well to get all the vegetables coated in the oil.
4. Bake the vegetables for 30 minutes, stirring halfway through.
5. Bring the water to the boil in a deep casserole and break up the Oxo cubes and add to the water. Stir until they've dissolved fully.
6. Add the baby spinach and simmer for a few minutes until it wilts, then keep warm until the tomatoes are ready.
7. Prepare the dill, tarragon and basil by washing and removing the stalks.
8. When the tomatoes are soft, they are ready. Add to the casserole along with the fresh herbs, then blend with a handmixer until smooth. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.
9. If you want to turn it into a sauce, replace on the hob and simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally until it's reduced and thickened further.

When I tasted it after blending, I thought it was OK, but it felt like something was missing. I was wondering if I should blitz in a handful of cashew nuts, but decided to leave it as is. Lundulph also tasted it and thought it would make a very nice sauce for fish, especially cod, but possibly also salmon. So we'll have it as soup tonight, but I'll bake some salmon and see how that works as well. If there's any soup left after that, I will add some cashews and see how that changes things. So the overall conclusion is that this needs a bit more work, but has potential.