Raymond Blanc's tomato essence

Five years ago, when I started this blog, I posted two recipes on the first day. One of them has reappeared in the Telegraph, which is where I think I got it in the first place. It is Raymond Blanc's truly wonderful tomato essence ... glamour without much effort, haute cuisine without the high price of Le Manoir**. Although it's a little shocking that Monsieur Seasonality is suggesting tomatoes so early in the year.

The fundamental recipe hasn't changed - why tinker with perfection? And now, M Blanc suggests that, as well as using the golden liquid as a soup, you can use it in a tomato risotto. I'll be posting that one day soon.

Imam biyaldi -ish

My sister and two of her sons are visiting from California, so we're at least eight for every meal - more often, though, into double figures, and fetching chairs from all over the house, even when we're eating in the garden.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are a tangle of good intentions thwarted, but even so, there is lots of fruit to pick if you can find it in the jungle of untied plants. And so our salads have been beautiful.

















With so many in the house, food needs to be simple to produce - but with so many young men, it also needs to be plentiful. Last night, we ate roast chicken, roast potatoes, courgettes, and a simple imam biyaldi, which I made by splitting aubergines lengthwise, baking them in a hot oven for 20 minutes before smearing them with a tomato sauce made by cooking down the remains of a tomato salad. They went back into the oven for another 10 minutes or so.

For pudding, we ate Tartuffo - my pa, who is in his late 80s and no longer eats much, had thirds, fourths, possibly even fifths. It's Willie Harcourt-Cooze's recipe, and I made it with his Peruvian Black chocolate and lovely yellow Guernsey cream from the Berkeley Farm dairy on the Marlborough Downs. The pudding was stirred while my sister and I caught up with a year's worth of family minutiae ... it doesn't get much better. Except that tonight, my sons are going to cook the roast potatoes, always a good moment, and my father has ordered one in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

Related links

A couple of summers ago, the boys were adamant that my "girlie" roast potatoes didn't quite cut the mustard, and so we ate them three nights in a row, while everyone put their oar in ...

The roast potato taste test
That's enough roast potatoes

and then, a little later, disaster struck the water supply, and I was reduced to buying Frozen roast potatoes


Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam
Preserving tomatoes in brine

Tasty tomatoes to grow
Dry-bottled tomatoes

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Dry-bottled tomatoes .... so good to eat, so quick to make

Forget everything I wrote about preserving tomatoes in brine - they're good, but you've got all that salt water to chuck. No, the most delicious way to preserve a tomato - beating slow-roasted hands down - is to bottle them dry with a little salt and sugar. Really fabulous - and you can just pour the contents of your jar into a saucepan and heat it up for an instant sauce.

You'll need 1tsp salt and 1/2 tsp sugar per 500g of tomatoes. You must pack them as tight as you can, because they collapse down to about the halfway line. Use sterilised bottles (10 minutes at 100C in the steam oven). Pack the jars, close the lid; 60 minutes at 100C.

If you don't have a steam oven, which let's face it, most of us don't (I'm borrowing one at the moment from Miele), you can do this using the slow-water method, the quick-water method, the oven method, or a pressure cooker. All more of a faff, because you have to be keen, and, above all, you have to be there. With the steam oven: 2 minutes' to pack the jar, and that's it - Ping! and it's done. No need even to worry about whether you can fit the result into the deep freeze.

Pictures soon ... I just wanted to get the method down before I lost the piece of paper with my notes.


PS if you want some details about the other methods, let me know and I'll post them ... this experiment with bottling/canning has involved consulting a big pile of books, so, for a few days only (before I forget), I am an encyclopaedia of knowledge about preserving tomatoes in a jar.

Related posts

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam
Preserving tomatoes in brine

Tasty tomatoes to grow

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Play date at the Miele Experience Centre
How DO you say Miele?

Tomatoes preserved in brine

Miele have lent me a steam oven to play with: until a few weeks ago, I didn't know such a thing existed; now I'm trying to work out whether I want one in the imminent re-design of a corner of my kitchen.

I didn't find it very easy to use when I tried to make part of dinner with it, but it did cook the asparagus to perfection - cooked through without going soggy. It was partly my in-built dislike of reading the instructions, and partly that the oven requires a precision which does not come naturally.

But now I've begun experimenting with bottling - what Americans call canning (and what we perhaps ought to call jarring). Here the steam oven comes into its own, making the process the work of moments. First you sterilise the bottles (15 mins at 100C), then you fill them and put them back in the oven. Ping! and it's done.

I'm going to dry-pack the next batch, just as soon as I can get my hands on some decent tomatoes: peel and pack, sprinkling with 1 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp sugar per 500ml of tomatoes.

Brined tomatoes

The brine I used was made with 15g salt to 1.1 litres of water.

Put the tomatoes into wet sterilised jars; I used 500g Le Parfait, which hold about 350g of fruit. Pour on the brine and seal the jars. I cooked these at 85C for 55 mins. A perfect guess. (According to the Reader's Digest Food from your Garden, they'd have needed 60-70 minutes using the oven method.)


Related posts

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam

Tasty tomatoes to grow

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Play date at the Miele Experience Centre
How DO you say Miele?

Beans on toast

Instant beans on toast ...

• Frying pan

• Olive oil

• Heat

• A few bacon bits

• Stir

• Can of canneloni beans

• Heat

• Fresh tomato - don't stint, this is the sauce
  

• Chopped parsley

• Toast

Mmmm .... so much better than Heinz.

Quick mushroom sauce for pasta

When I chop vegetables, I go for speed. When Lettice chops them, she takes enough care to end up with uniformly small cubes. Her Caprese salad ends up almost like a salsa, little cubes of cheese and avocado with finely diced tomato. It's good; it may not be the slices you expected, but it's good.

This is the pasta sauce she made for lunch: utterly delicious - the pieces were so small they barely needed cooking, which gave everything a fresh taste. Mine would have been chunky and clunky (and taken longer to cook).

Lettice's mushroom sauce

Finely dice onion, sweat it in a little olive oil. Meanwhile, get to work on some tomatoes and some mushrooms. When the onions are soft, add the vegetables, plus a splash of Marsala and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Cook briefly - certainly no longer than it takes to cook the pasta. Adjust the seasoning and stir into the drained pasta.

Tasty tomatoes to grow next year

This blighted year has been hopeless for growing tomatoes - what with one thing (slugs) and another (blight), we've had very few, Sungold doing best (although my extremely conservative family would prefer it red, rather than that wonderful yellow).

At the end of August, there was an article in the Telegraph by Sarah Raven about home-grown tomatoes with the best taste. Here are her key findings - now I can chuck out the paper yet still be sure of finding this very sensible list next year.

Her main piece of advice is to grow one or two of several varieties: any tomato dish is better for having a mix of varieties - different shape, colours and sizes, all with varying levels of sweetness and acidity. If you use three or four different forms, your salads will look more attractive, your sauces will be richer, and your tomato jams and chutneys will taste better.

Sungold: truly outstanding. Can be grown inside and out.

Gardener's Delight: Sarah has long championed this tomato, which just beat Super Sweet 100 in her trial this year. Both form long trusses which ripen over a long period for nonstop harvesting.

Black Krim: this tomato comes from Crimea. I've never grown it, but I have eaten it - delicious, once you've got over the monstrous appearance of black skin and startlingly green inside. Sarah says it has good disease resistance, and that it was the last of her outdoor tomatoes to get blight this year.

Costoluto Fiorentino / Costoluto Genovese: two old varieties from Italy, better grown in a greenhouse. Highly productive of large fruit. She says that about one in eight plants will go blind ... mine (outdoors) were the first to get blight this year.

Brandywine: obviously wonderful, but tricky to grow - it only performs well in a greenhouse in a good hot year, and even then only produces small amounts of fruit. Very comforting words to someone who has tried and failed several times to grow this delicious giant fruit.

Tigerella: medium-sized, stripey green and red skin. We got a few of this before the blight struck. Sarah's sister grows this under glass in Edinburgh, Sarah says it can be grown outdoors in the south of England.

Red Alert: outshines all other tumblers in terms of flavour. No need to train, can go in a window box, gives vast amounts of tasty fruit

Sarah also says that she's not going to bother with plum tomatoes next year, as they have a grainy texture, are quite dry and not good eaten raw, even the foodies' favourite, San Marzano, which I don't think is as good as is claimed. The best, she thinks, is the hardier Purple Russian, but she says not as good as any of the others on her list.

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen