How to bottle sunshine – slow roast organic Romanian tomatoes in jars

summer in a jar

I’ve eaten tomatoes around the Mediterranean, I’ve eaten Mexican and Californian tomatoes and I love to eat tomatoes like a fruit but hear me out – Romanian tomatoes are simply the best except maybe for Mum’s home grown ones. So when you have the chance to buy proper slow grown heritage varieties grab all you can and when you cant gorge on them any more here is how to bottle that taste of summer. I try and avoid superfluous titles in my posts but these merit it.

How to preserve that flavour? Now personally along with other fads like the balsamification of food I am not a fan of “sun dried tomatoes” – I would rather put shoe leather on my plate. But semi dried or if you permit me to use the term, “confit” tomatoes where they are moist and the flavour has been concentrated down – thats a whole different ball game!

Ingredients

The best most flavourful ugly mug tomatoes money can buy plus bay leaves, rosemary, thyme and garlic to throw in the jars. This may look like I stalk veggie sellers in markets but you need to secure your tomato swag! the particular ones here and I could not stop nicking them off the trays both before and after roasting were from Nicole at La Tanti Ioana – beautiful veggie boxes.

How To

What you want is lightly roasted, not blackened, and cooked through well, but not dried out. Many recipes call for olive oil to be dribbled over at this stage but I don’t bother. Why waste and ruin volatile oils whose goodness and flavor is maximized cold? Simply sprinkle a little salt and pepper over them. Slice in half horizontally. Roast at 90C until they decrease in volume by 50% – approx 2-3 hours in a convection oven or a day or two on a tin roof in the Balkans. But then I am accident prone…the whole tin roof thing while eco friendly….might not be me-friendly…

I love how they change

and you see the caramelised juices appear. Thats how I like mine. If you are fussy you can de-seed them before roasting. I think life is too short. Roasting the tomatoes of course doesn’t decrease their rich supply of lycopenes, a powerful antioxidant.

Then I prepare the jars adding the herbs that come to hand and that will infuse the tomatoes with a bit of added flavour. You dont have to do this – I just like to do it and it makes the resulting sauces and pestos even more effortless. If only people would believe that convenience food can also be home made.

So now squish in your tomatoes. I like to keep them looking orderly, I dont want tomato mush. These ones went in so well there was almost no room for a drizzle of olive oil or cold pressed sunflower oil.

and then they get to be water babies. Here they are with the sweet and sour cherries being taken to 100C for a good 30 minute boil to sterilise them.

Thats it folks! And you can do amazing things with them.

Use to make the fastest most intense Roast Tomato Sauce ever

Use to make the best Roast Tomato, Walnut & Lemon pesto ever

or just crush over toasted bread rubbed with a little garlic and the oil from the jar and have a glass of red wine.

Roast tomato sauce

Its fast and faster still if made with home bottled roast tomatoes

its easy, its intense

it covers all tomato sauce bases.

Simmer meatballs in it, layer a dish of melanzane parmigiana, serve plain with home made pasta and freshly grated parmesan, pour over fried eggs, dribble across sausages and green lentils, make your best pizza ever and so on and so on. You cant have enough good tomato sauce on hand in the kitchen. There are as many different types of tomato sauce as there are cooks so here is my “go to” sauce that is fool proof when you are confronted with less than inspiring fruit and stunning when made with summery full flavour specimens.

If you want a smooth sauce (personally a bit prissy I think and smacks of baby food) then either peel and seed your tomatoes first or pass the mixture through a “mouli” (food mill). For everyday home cooking there really is no need and besides the seeds and skin is where a lot of the goodness lies.

Ingredients

4 cloves garlic

1 onion

1 kg of tomatoes or a jar of the home bottled tomatoes

Some alcohol such as left over red wine (in the rare case this might occur) or better martini, approx 300ml

1 lemon with the skin peeled in strips, juice of the lemon

Some Worcestershire sauce (optional but I like it)

How To

Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally. Oil a baking sheet that you have covered with aluminium foil (reduce washing up). Don’t bother to skin the onion or garlic. Throw the garlic, tomatoes and onion on the sheet and roast in the oven for approximately 1 hour – until the tomatoes look well cooked and start to caramelize a bit. You want the little brown caramelly bits.

If you have bottled these beauties…you just fast forward all the way here..and fry some onions and garlic in a sauce pan and add your tomatoes from the jar (do discard the rosemary as it will be bitter but the thyme is fine)

At this stage the seasoning is up to you and the final dish you are using the sauce for. I sometimes add thyme, oregano or Worcestershire sauce depending on the dish and lets be honest depending on what is in the kitchen. Let the mixture boil and then cook on a low low heat for at least 20 minutes. The sauce deepens in flavour if you can leave it an hour. Take out the bay leaves and lemon peel. Bitter blitzed up bay leaves are really disgusting. You have been warned! Blitz it all up with your blender of choice (I use the stick blender) and you are set to go.

Variations: add the onion raw at the end when you blitz for a sauce with a bit of kick “gazpacho style”. The onion is blitzed in raw and gives not only great flavor but the maximum power of the almighty onion! Both onions and garlic are cholesterol busters so don’t be shy. Onions are high in vitamin C, B6, biotin, chromium, calcium and dietary fiber and also contain good amounts of folic acid and vitamin B1 and K.

Strawberry & Lime Jam

a bittersweet kind of strawberry jam.

Strawberry jam to me has always been a bit insipid and uninspiring. The goodytooshoes of jams:the safe side of jams: the no risk option: the middle of the jam road. Time to stray over the tracks for this is the darker side of jam. A bitter twist from those whole limes.

So where were we with me and strawberry jam. Added to its oh so dull nature the sheer pernicketyness given its low pectin levels annoys me so there have been years when I just didn’t bother making it. But then I’ve been making strawberry & lime pannacottas …strawberry & lime smoothies…strawberry & lime cheesecakes and I didn’t get tired of this magical combination (which for one with a low boredom threshold is something). And so a marriage between a high pectin easy setting lime marmalade and classic strawberry jam seemed like a good idea. It was time to give strawberry time a second chance. And so here it is.

The method involves using boiled limes (to soften and extract pectin) as if making marmalade and this stage can be done in advance and you can even boil your citrus fruits up and freeze them ready for when the jam making bug seizes you. For it can strike at any inopportune moment.

Ingredients

225g limes
625 ml water
sugar to weigh 2/3 what the lime water mix is after boiling. allow for approx 500g sugar
1.5 kg strawberries topped and tailed (approx before)
1.5kg sugar

please read:

How to

Prepare everything in advance (see rules). Clean jars ready and heating up in the oven you are ready to roll…

Part I The first part can be done in advance. Here you want the limes nicely softened down and all that pectin released. It depends what mood I am in…I made one batch where I roughly chopped them up and I made one where I had the patience to chop them into delicate slivers. Boil up the limes with the water. The rind should be really nice and soft – let them simmer gently for roughly an hour. Then weigh what you have and whatever you have, you want 2/3 of the weight as sugar. The limes do turn a bit greyish and lose a bit of their bright green look.

Part II The Strawberries.

Firstly, do use local strawberries not frou frou flown in strawberries. I like to buy big bags of them and I kind of like the slightly dirty squidgy sordid nature of the fermenting strawberry at the bottom of the bag experience you find down the piata here. So once the fruit has been purchased I chop my strawberries into pieces. It may seem a bit tedious but I want a jam not strawberry conserve. Then when you have the fruit weigh it as some will have been lost in hulling them discarding the rotten ones and of course eating a few. Now add an equal quantity of sugar.

Let the sugar dissolve. Its quite a good idea to leave it overnight. Like I said its all about the preparation.

Combine parts one and two in one big heavy bottomed pot

Now if you have not dissolved your sugar, place on a low heat until the sugar warms through and dissolves. Then put it on the max and let it boil and when I mean boil I mean boil.

Now follow the rules

This jam needed approx 30 minutes to reach setting point and it indeed set at 107C. However as I wanted to preserve colour and I am not obsessed about a rigid set more about bright colour and great taste its a soft set.

I like this jam with yoghurt in the morning and just a sprinkle of granola or drizzled over cheesecake….its definitely one for dairy products.