Dry them, fry them, turn them into sauce: what to cook with cheap, juicy summer tomatoes
An abundance of truss tomatoes means now is the perfect time for Australian shoppers to take advantage of the lower prices – while also helping out overloaded growers. Stocking up on the summer staple will ensure your shelves are packed with tomato-based sunshine for the colder months ahead.
Whether you’re serving tomatoes fresh in a panzanella salad or making a sauce for shakshuka, here are fresh ideas for making the most of affordable tomatoes.
Oven-dried tomatoes
Oven-dried tomatoes are the least labour-intensive but most time-consuming way of preserving a bumper crop. Just three ingredients – tomatoes, salt and a little olive oil – will extend that intense summer flavour of any tomato-infused dish until well into autumn. The longer the tomatoes are left in the oven, the less the moisture and the longer the shelf life, especially if you preserve them in olive oil. One and a half hours of drying will produce moist tomatoes that can be stored in a sealed container in the fridge for a week. Four to six hours and storage in sterilised glass under good quality oil will extend their refrigerated life by up to two months. Delia Smith recommends up to eight hours with a resulting storage life of six months.
Her roasted tomato salad is a simple but delicious way to serve them, and her roasted tomato soup with basil puree and olive croutons combines the best of summer ingredients in a bowl.
In the coming months, serve your oven-dried tomatoes on an antipasto platter along with olives, a grilled vegetable mélange (that’s French for whatever is in the fridge), leftover meats and good bread or crackers.
Dried tomatoes are also at the heart of pan bagnat, a glorious Mediterranean sandwich. I first discovered it when working in a food store owned by wine writer and enthusiastic home cook Ralph Kyte-Powell. He introduced me to a simple version comprised of a crusty baguette filled with black olive tapenade, salami and chopped boiled egg mixed with the best mayonnaise you can get your hands on, salad greens, salami slices and fresh chopped sun- or oven-dried tomatoes with a generous sprinkling of black pepper.
Related: Nigel Slater’s summer tomato recipes to enrich the soul
Puree
Both Kyte-Powell and food writer Rita Erlich recommend making tomato puree with excess tomatoes, as it can be frozen in a range of portions for later use and makes an ideal base for a pizza, pasta sauce or anything else that requires tomato at short notice.
Erlich’s method is simple: she recommends selecting ripe tomatoes, skinning them (slitting the skin, dipping into boiling water for 30 seconds) and leaving to cool then peeling off the skin and squeezing out the seeds. This step is less important with Roma tomatoes, which have fewer seeds.
Chop the tomatoes roughly. Put a little olive oil into a saucepan, add a whole clove of garlic and when the garlic turns brown, remove it. Add a small, finely chopped onion and let it soften over low heat. Add the chopped tomatoes. Season with salt and maybe a whisper of sugar if the sauce needs a little more flavour. Let them cook over medium-low heat for 15-20 minutes, then add some chopped herbs (parsley, basil). The mixture can be pushed through a sieve for finer texture or blitzed with a handheld blender.
Passata and puree are often used to describe the same bottled product on supermarket shelves. But true passata is made using summer’s ripest tomato harvest, lightly cooked then pushed through a food mill or a larger special device called a passapomodoro (tomato passer).
Is it worth the bother for the average home cook? The sheer quantity and the large number of people required to produce it leads Erlich to recommend against it. Kyte-Powell concurs: “I reckon it needs a lot of pissing around. We have never made it but have enjoyed it made by others.”
Luisa Frau, a first-generation Australian-Italian, has a different take on the laborious process: “How do you put a price on gathering with the family and enjoying something you’re passionate about?”
Salads
Felicity Cloake’s inspirational Completely Perfect was the only cookbook at my accommodation in Burgundy two summers ago. Coupled with the constant supply of summer vegetables from my neighbour’s garden, it was the perfect way to rediscover my cooking mojo and use up some of those excess tomatoes. Her perfect salade niçoise offers a tuna-free yet authentic alternative to your average niçoise, replacing the tuna with anchovies. Make sure your anchovies are as good as you can find.
Yotam Ottolenghi has a plethora of tomato-based recipes. His chopped salad with tahini and za’atar is one of the simpler recipes in his collection but packs a flavourful punch, while David Atherton’s tomato salad uses your leftover stale bread as well as your excess tomatoes.
Fried tomatoes
While breading and frying is usually reserved for unripe green tomatoes in the classic American dish, Nigel Slater’s recipe works with ripe ones too. The tomatoes are served straight from the pan, with coriander mayonnaise. Take care not to burn your mouth!
Sauces
Rita Erlich’s summer base tomato sauce is made with onion, red capsicum and tiny cherry tomatoes, slowly cooked with some olive oil and salt, with your choice of cumin, parsley, basil, garlic, bay leaves. Use it with eggs (shakshuka), as pasta sauce, with sauteed chicken (and some paprika), on toasted bread with goat’s cheese, on a pizza base with mozzarella and some olives, with grilled lamb cutlets, stirred through cooked black or green lentils.
Felicity Cloake’s perfect ratatouille does away with the initial frying of all the vegetables, a welcome change and one your waistline will thank you for, while Rachel Roddy’s tomato and bay leaf sauce gives a slightly Middle Eastern twist to an old favourite.
