Weekend cooking project: all about green tomatoes
Weekend cooking project: all about green tomatoes
Use green tomatoes to make a galette, a pesto, and fry them to make a frittata.
As every year, these last days of summer are bittersweet. If, on one side, I can’t wait for Autumn to come, especially for the cooler temperatures and the colours that will tinge the countryside of the most beautiful flaming orange, red, and burnt maroon, on the other side I’m already starting to miss Summer, its fruit and vegetables, and that sense of freedom given by its long days.
I can totally relate to what I wrote two years ago in this post.
With my feet soaked in a cold, end of season clear water, my fingers tucked in the sand, I decided that I would have enjoyed these last days that remain of summer. I began to wonder if I had eaten enough watermelon, if I had spent enough hours outdoors, dining out with my family under the olive trees. Had I paid enough attention to the singing of crickets in the evening, or of the cicadas in the afternoon?
Have I filled my eyes with enough gold and sunflowers before the countryside changes its outfit in the autumn colour? Is all this fresh basil enough? Will I miss the gesture of inhaling deeply its balsamic aroma every time I pick a few leaves? Will the figs I stole from the tree in the garden be sufficient until next summer? How many ripe tomatoes did I harvest?
Here they come, those mixed feelings of nostalgia and expectation, the same that I felt when I would go back to school. To silence them, I went to the vegetable garden and picked up those green tomatoes that at the end of the season are struggling to ripen on the fragile branches.
So today’s newsletter is all about green tomatoes.
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Green tomato galette
This is a quick pastry dough, my favourite for savoury pies. You can make it in five minutes, and it has only four very common ingredients, which are usually in all the pantries. Moreover, it puffs up while baking almost by magic.
I made a galette, a pie that does not need a mould, simple and satisfying, and I filled it with fresh goat cheese, green tomatoes, basil leaves and pine nuts.
For the pastry dough:
250 g of stone-ground wheat flour
160 g cold butter
½ teaspoon of salt
100 ml of iced water
1 egg to brush the pastry
For the stuffing
4-5 green tomatoes, better if of different varieties
1 tablespoon of pine nuts
180 g of fresh goat cheese
1 teaspoon of sesame seeds
extra virgin olive oil
fine sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
Begin with the pastry dough. Add the flour with the salt to a large bowl, then add the butter. Coat the stick of butter with flour in the bowl, then using a bench scraper cut the butter lengthwise in half, then lengthwise in quarters, coating each newly cut side in flour. Dice the butter and cover each piece in flour, then with a pastry cutter press the mixture as you would mash potatoes.
Add the iced water little by little and mix quickly with your hands just enough to create a ball. Work the dough as little as possible. Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour.
Now preheat the oven to 210°C.
Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it out into a 3 mm thick disk. Place it on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
Spread the goat cheese in the centre, leaving about 4 cm from the edges. Season with salt, black pepper and extra virgin olive oil.
Thinly slice the tomatoes and arrange them on the goat cheese, alternating them in shape and shades of green. If you have some cherry tomatoes, scatter them on top. Now add some basil leaves and pine nuts on top, then dress with extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. Fold the edges of the dough over the tomatoes.
Brush the dough with a beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Bake the galette for about 40 minutes, or until the dough is golden and the tomatoes well cooked.
Let the galette rest for about 20 minutes, then serve.
More recipes with green tomatoes from the blog archive
Pasta with green tomato pesto
You make it while the pasta is cooking, using those green tomatoes from your garden that just don’t want to get ripe. If you don’t have a vegetable garden, go to the market: among the ripe ones, now you can spot the green tomatoes, and it is often the farmers themselves who will tell you the best recipes to use them. Listen to them, that’s how I add new recipes to my repertoire!
Find the recipe for the green tomato pesto on the blog.
Fried green tomato frittata
We do not cook this frittata often in my family, but it used to be a staple when my grandma was a child. You start with firm, tart green tomatoes, you fry them to bring out their hidden sweetness, then bind everything together with a couple of eggs.
Find the recipe for the fried green tomato frittata on the blog.
If you decide to participate in the weekend cooking project, share the results with us on social media by using the hashtag #myseasonaltable and tagging @julskitchen on Instagram.
If you have questions about the ingredients or the recipe, if you have a special request for one of the next cooking projects, or if you just want to have a chat, just reply to this email.
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