I still make salsa the same basic way I have for almost ten years - I combine fresh and cooked ingredients, because what I want in salsa is a texture that'll stick to chips.

Diced onions and chiles cooked in just a little oil, with tomato puree and salt added - cooked until it's thick. In this case I added a little cucumber juice, because I happened to have extra, which is the subject of another post. If you want a more elegant salsa, you can strain the tomato puree; I usually don't.

Meanwhile, fresh corn kernels just off the cob, chopped fresh tomato, fresh culantro, and fresh Texas tarragon, are tossed together in a jar.

The tomato puree is added to the fresh ingredients, and the head softens the fresh ingredients just enough, while thickening the whole mix.




Served here with Fritos, and homemade macaroni and cheese.

tomato soup

It's tomato soup season.

I halved tomatoes and scooped the seed pulp out, while roasting summer squash and corn kernels in the oven.

Chopped up some onion and carrot and cooked them with a little butter and flour until the onions had softened. Added the tomato halves, salt, and zaatar (a seasoning blend with sesame seeds, sumac, and thyme). Cooked, covered, until the carrots are cooked through. Blended. Strained. Returned to the pot, cooked down a little until it tasted right, and added a pat of butter.

After ladling the soup into bowls, it's the garnish that makes it more interesting: roasted corn kernels, slices of roasted summer squash, sprigs of purslane, the reserved tomato seed pulp, and a drizzle of scallion oil.  (Blend scallions and oil together; heat briefly until it sizzles; cool and strain.)

It took five medium tomatoes for two servings (plus one small onion and one small carrot).

marx chiles contest: curry duck confit with red rice hash

Friend of the blog, Marx Foods, is having a dried chiles recipe contest for which they provide the chiles and in which this post is my entry. They sent me a sampler of dried chiles to choose from: organic habaneros, puya, japones, mulato, aji amarillo, and cascabel. Once all the entries have been sent in, I'll link you to Marx's blog post where you can vote for whichever recipe you like.

Though I didn't use them in this recipe, the puya chiles were a nice find - similar to guajillo, the chile I use the most, but a little hotter.

But I decided to use the aji amarillo here, because they were the only chile that I'd had fresh but not dry. Aji amarillos are a yellowish-orange Peruvian chile, a variety of the Capsicum baccatum species - the same species that includes Peppadews and Lemon Drop chiles. All three chiles are noted for their sweetness, fruitiness, and moderate to high spice level, which was perfect for what I decided to make:

Curry duck confit, with red rice hash.

Two duck leg quarters, plus any excess skin and fat from the duck, if available
About two tablespoons good curry powder
Two dried aji amarillo chiles, crushed; use more chile if you want a high heat level
About two teaspoons salt, divided
Coconut fat, amount variable
One cup rice
Two to three very fresh red tomatoes
Tablespoon minced fresh ginger
Four small links sweet Chinese sausage

I think it's probably clear that I often cook Southern food. In this case, you have Southern dishes (Country Captain chicken - a fruity tomato-based chicken curry; and red rice - rice cooked with tomatoes and usually peppers, a sort of simplified jambalaya) melded with some Asian concepts (curry itself, obviously; fried rice; and the Chinese sausage in the rice hash).

Obviously the aji amarillo chile is neither Asian nor Southern, but the color reminded me of curry, and the fruitiness works with both the rice hash and the traditional inclusion of raisins with Country Captain.

Curry duck confit

There's a reason I'm not calling the duck "Country Captain duck" - it wasn't cooked in tomato, the tomato is only present in the rest of the dish. Instead, I used coconut fat - the health food section of your supermarket may have it - to cook two duck leg quarters duck confit style. The coconut flavor really permeated the duck, as much as the curry flavors did - you get a similar flavor profile to coconut-milk-based curries.

Duck confit was originally a way to preserve duck in salt and fat. Because modern duck confit is usually made with much less salt, it shouldn't be kept for years on end, nor stored at room temperature. In this case - as in most cases when I make duck confit - the goal wasn't to preserve it at all, although I do believe that the flavor of duck confit improves if you let it stay covered in fat in your fridge for a week.

Cover the duck legs with the curry powder, three quarters of the crushed chile, and half the salt, and let them sit in the refrigerator overnight. Add enough coconut fat that, once it and the duck fat have melted, the legs will be covered in melted fat. That's a judgment call, obviously, but it's easy to add a little more coconut fat during the cooking process. The fat shouldn't be bubbling violently during cooking the way it would if you were frying, so it's okay if the level of melted fat comes fairly high up on your cooking dish; if you're worried about anything bubbling over, use a lower cooking temp and a longer cooking time.

Cook the duck at 250-275 for most of the day. You get to where you can tell if it's ready by looking at it, but what you want is for the duck to be very tender, almost like pulled pork, and for all of the fat to have cooked out of the skin; the bone of the drumstick will be at least a little loose. Let it cool on the stovetop and then refrigerate it until you're ready to make your dinner.

Red rice hash

The red rice hash is easiest if you make the red rice the night before. I used my rice steamer - adding the rice, a large fresh tomato (chopped), the rest of the chile, the rest of the salt, and the minced ginger, and adding the appropriate amount of water. This made it pretty easy to get the amount of water correct, because I just added it to the fill line. If you use another method to make your rice, just account for the liquid the tomatoes are going to add. Once the rice is cooked, spread it out on a plate (to help it dry out a little) and keep it in the fridge overnight.

The Chinese sausage I used is sold frozen, in packages of four small links (each one about half the size of a hot dog), in Asian markets. It's greasy, it's sweet - sweet enough that the sugars caramelize when you cook the sausage long enough - and it's mild, with a little tanginess.

To assemble the dish

Reheat duck long enough to melt the fat, heat the duck up, and crisp the skin;

Chop up the Chinese sausage and heat it in a pan with the rice on medium to medium-high heat, turning periodically to help crisp the rice. You will not need to add cooking fat; if the rice is still especially wet, just let the sausage cook a while first. You definitely want to crisp up a lot of the rice, so that you have the textural contrast;

Sear two halves of a big fat tomato (ends trimmed off) in a pan with a little bit of the duck/coconut fat.

Serve with lime wedges to be squeezed over everything. The acidity of the lime and the fresh tomato is really needed in order to cut through the richness of the duck, the coconut fat, and the Chinese sausage.

make a grown man cry

Summer isn't really summer in New Hampshire until it's almost fall.  It's the middle of August and the tomatoes are only just getting going at a good clip - before you know it, it'll be apple and pumpkin season.  Instead of the summer full of produce that you get even in Indiana - nevermind places further south - you get a brief window when everything comes at once.  Could be worse.  Could be Maine.

Tomato pie is only worth making with fresh tomatoes from a garden or a farm.  Nothing from the supermarket, nothing that's been in the refrigerator - there are flavor compounds in tomatoes that are destroyed by refrigerator-level temperatures, though most of the tomatoes from the supermarket have already been through that, already lost those, so feel free to treat them like the invulnerable little hunks of blushing flavorless science they are.

A lot of recipes for tomato pie call for basil, but the only reason I can see for that is that people see tomatoes, people see cheese, people think Italian.  There's nothing about this that needs to be Italian - I focus just on the tomatoes.  Once in a blue moon I mix something in with the cheese to add a little flavor, some onion or pimento cheese or something.

Now, supposedly you can freeze tomato pie, and that got me wondering about how soggy a thawing tomato pie might get - so I scooped the pulp out of my tomatoes for this pie, which is a good idea if you want to cut down on potential sogginess, but not strictly necessary:

Lightly sprinkle the tomato slices with salt and drain them on paper towels (or napkins in my case) for 10-15 minutes, to draw some of the juices out.  Meanwhile, bake a single pie crust until it starts to turn golden.

I sprinkled a little bit of mozzarella on the pie crust after it baked, to provide a sort of seal between the crust and the tomatoes - another anti-sog maneuver.  Layer your tomatoes in - you may want to chop a few into chunks to fill gaps:

The topping for tomato pie is traditionally a combination of cheese and mayonnaise.  The mayonnaise just acts as a binder, helps to make the topping something slightly different than just melted cheese.  Paula Deen's recipe uses equal amounts of cheddar, dry mozzarella, and mayonnaise (one cup of each), which I find too heavy on the mayo.  I eyeballed the cheese - sharp cheddar, mozzarella left over from the pizzas, and a little cotija cheese - and added just a little more mayo than was needed to bind it together like egg salad.  There's no alchemy here, you don't need precise proportions.

Tomato pie should be served slightly warm from the oven (not hot; let it cool off a little) or room-temperature.

Now, what to do with the tomato pulp?  Supposedly, the pulp and the seeds contain the most umami flavor, though I've seen this contradicted and haven't followed up to find out the truth.  In any case, the pulp certainly has plenty of flavor, and you should feel free to do something with it.  I had a little pasta (cooked in water spiked with Zatarain's crab boil), with tomato pulp and shredded cheese.

Well hang on, one more thing on pizza, because if I hold it all for the big long pizza post, it's gonna be too long for anybody to read:

Umami Pizza Sauce:

Tomato base: Roast a quantity of good flavorful tomatoes until they have lost quite a lot of liquid; do not use salt.  Remove skins and puree; you can strain the seeds out, but don't need to.  If good flavorful fresh tomatoes aren't available to you, puree a can of San Marzano tomatoes and cook until thickened.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, diced and sauteed: onion, fennel, sweet pepper.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, pureed with the tomato base: garlic, carrot, charred onion, sweet pepper, hot pepper.

Umami/salt component: fish sauce to taste, or anchovies pureed with the tomato base, or soy sauce.  You can also simmer parmesan rinds (sometimes available cheaply at your supermarket) in the tomato base and then strain them out.  You should use a sufficient quantity of your umami component so that you don't need to add salt.

Let sit in the fridge for at least one day.  Include a hard grating cheese -- Pecorino Romano, aged gouda, Parmesan, etc -- in the cheese element of the pizza.

Always sauce your pizza lightly.  More heavily sauced pizza styles are perfectly fine if that's what you like ... but not when you're working with a home oven.

outlive all the septuagenarians

I don't like vodka. A quickie history of the deterioration of cocktails would go something like this: Prohibition puts some producers out of business and alters the availability of ingredients because of the different economics of the black market; the low quality of moonshine and increasing acceptability of drinking among women leads to favoring sweeter concoctions, a trend that takes off like a rocket in the 70s; faced with the difficulty of marketing an essentially odorless and tasteless product, vodka importers after WWII emphasize vodka's inherent mixability -- with no flavor, it won't clash with anything.  Before long, you have generations of drinkers who don't realize the vodka martini is a variant, not the default.  Horseshit fern bars popularize horseshit drinks designed to get you drunk without having to taste anything that might be unpalatable to a twelve year old, foreshadowing the twenty-first century's fruit punch flavored cigarettes, while horseshit sorority girls glug vodka and Diet Coke.

Vodka is more than a little ridiculous.

Good vodka is even less appropriate for cocktails, because the flavors are so subtle that almost any addition will cover them up.  It's like making a cocktail with mineral water.  This is something I'm struggling with in my remix of the appletini, which we will get to when we get to it.

I don't like tomato juice either.  Whether canned or fresh, it tastes like unseasoned soup to me, not like a beverage.  (And forget about Clamato -- although people always focus on hockey and poutine and the ou diphthong, the real divide between Canada and the US is that no one in the US has ever heard of a Bloody Caesar, which in Canada is so popular some bars will keep Clamato on the gun.)

So ... a Bloody Mary is really off my usual menu.

But from time to time I like to take a thing I don't like, and find a way I like it.  The tricky thing is to do this without violating the semantic boundaries that make the thing that thing.  If I didn't like steak, grinding it up to make a hamburger would be cheating.  If I didn't like pizza, putting pepperoni and mozzarella on a tomato sandwich would still be cheating.  Figuring out where those boundaries are is sometimes tricky.  Finding a way to make a lobster roll I liked was a challenge that took a long time, because if you do too much with a lobster roll -- if you make a bahn mi, if you season it too much, if you deep-fry lobster chunks and make a poboy -- it is simply no longer a lobster roll.

What is interesting and attractive about the Bloody Mary is that it is the only cocktail that encourages innovation and personal touches.  An Old-Fashioned with a bunch of other shit added to it isn't an Old-Fashioned anymore.  A Bloody Mary with a bunch of shit added to it is some guy's Bloody Mary.  You could argue this is true of the Pimm's Cup, I suppose, but it obtains only on the garnish level, whereas checking yes or no next to Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, bouillon, horseradish, and lemon juice is a common method of Bloody Mary personalization.

Clearly a Bloody Mary must have tomato as the principal flavor.  What is not clear is whether it must have vodka.  Yes, I know there are a million names for "a Bloody Mary made with bourbon instead of vodka" or the like, but I don't care about that.

I've had these issues in mind for a while.  You saw some Bloody Mary brainstorming on the August whiteboard.  A few days ago there was a post on Kaiser Penguin about making a Bloody Mary from tomato water -- made by pureeing tomato and straining it through a bag to get a clear liquid with strong tomato flavor, rather than the pulpy soup-like stuff -- and that solves the tomato juice texture issue for me.

So.  For my first Bloody Mary experiment, for Sunday brunch this fine Labor Day weekend: tomato water and Old Gristmill corn whiskey.  I'm not interested in all that maiden aunt horseshit with the seventeen garnishes and the skewer of blue-cheese-stuffed-olive-wrapped-in-prosciutto.  Is my name T.G.I. Chuckles McBennigans?  Do you see a bunch of shit on the walls?  Am I wearing any flair?  This is a goddamn drink.

The rim is celery root salt, from Fergus Henderson's recipe: you shred up celery root, mix it with salt, bake it until dry, and grind it back up.  It makes an amazing celery salt, great with eggs or potatoes.

4 1/2 oz tomato water

1 1/2 oz corn whiskey

squeeze of lemon juice

dash each of St Germain elderflower liqueur, Fee's whiskey barrel aged bitters, homemade cayenne vinegar

And the brunch to accompany this drink: Duck confit and fried egg, with tomato, roasted green chile (courtesy of Nikki and Bill's annual crosscontinental chile-apple exchange), and lactic corn.

I know.

You're thinking, Bill.  Bill.  Bill.  You're going on about this Bloody Mary, what in the name of the Great Gazoo is lactic corn?

Well, that's perfectly reasonable, because there's a greater than usual chance that I made it up.  You remember what we were talking about with the country ham.  What's the key chemical process in making country ham?  Right.  Lactic fermentation, the harnessing of friendly ambient wildlife in order to create and preserve flavor, which in addition to country ham is responsible for sourdough bread and sauerkraut.

Ah, there you go, you figured it out.

I immersed fresh corn from the cob in saltwater, left it on the counter for a few days until it turned sour, and boom.  Lactic corn -- crisp, tangy, deeeelightful.

As for the drink ... it's certainly better, to my tomato juice disliking palate, than the usual thing.  The ingredients I used in small amounts sort of boost and highlight aspects of tomato flavor, and unsurprisingly corn whiskey is a pretty good match for tomato water.  I don't know if we're there yet, though.

What I want from salsa is good fresh flavor, a little bite, and for it to stick to a tortilla chip instead of forcing me to use one as a spoon.  The way I get that is by using both cooked and fresh tomatoes, which is why I usually only make homemade salsa -- for chips and salsa, anyway -- in the summer.

This particular salsa takes half of the tomatoes, by volume, and dices them; the other half is roasted in the oven, peeled, pureed, and strained to get the seeds out.  If you leave the skin on and proceed to puree and strain, you'll get a more noticeably roasted flavor -- I did that with some of the tomato puree I've frozen for the long tomato-less year.

While the tomatoes are roasting, the diced tomatoes are combined in a bowl with diced chiles (cherry bomb peppers and cayenne in this case), diced onion, a little garlic, a little Cuban oregano (it's more similar to Mexican oregano than Italian oregano, though it is a third plant altogether), and a little salt.  That's it, you're done (though it will taste much better after a night in the fridge).  Easy as pie.  The puree, thickened by roasting, binds the fresh ingredients together and gives you chip-stick-ability.

Sometimes I add an acid like lemon or lime juice.  I never add vinegar, though I know many people do.  I think the combination of tomato puree, vinegar, and corn syrup in so many commercial salsas has a lot to do with why it's been outselling ketchup for almost twenty years -- it brings the products closer together.  I want the thickness, but not ketchup-like qualities.

I add diced cucumber to salsa pretty often, but didn't in this case because it's a fairly large bowl of salsa, and if cucumbers sit in an acidic medium too long, they'll begin to pickle.  I'll add cucumbers to this when I have little enough left that I know I'll use it up in a day or two.  Also, the spicier your salsa, the better a combination the cucumbers will make.

at last

It had been a terrible, dismal season, stormy and misfortunate.  Too little sun and too much damp.  Time and again we had been denied the crimson bounty.  The crew had near given up hope, when at last we spied it --

A tomato.

Ripe on the vine, not yet split by rains nor wracked by blight.

We set upon it like jackals.

Tomato sandwich, bourbon bacon, pepper.  The tomato isn't from my garden, but from my mother's -- my tomato plants were almost completely destroyed by blight this year.  The tomatoes I can get aren't nearly as good as last year's, but they're still better than the tomatoes that'll be available the rest of the year.

Things that benefit the most from using good fresh tomatoes: tomato sandwiches (pointless any other time of year), tomato pie (prebake a pie crust; add sliced tomatoes sprinkled with salt and pepper, top with a mixture of shredded cheddar cheese, optional dry mozzarella, and enough mayonnaise to make the cheese stick together; bake for 30 minutes), tomatoes and okra, tomatoes and scrambled eggs, pasta with minimally cooked tomatoes, and presumably tomato juice (of which I'm not really a fan).

There is also the classic hamburger:

My prescription for a good hamburger is very simple: add little or nothing to the meat (though ground bacon mixed in with the beef is a good variation), knock it off with the enormous patties, salt the surface of the patty, cook it on hot cast iron to develop a good crust, let it rest for a few minutes before putting it on the bun (Martin's potato roll) or, in a pinch, the bread.  George Motz is right -- mustard is better on hamburgers than ketchup, even if you love ketchup.

If you have some tomatoes that aren't as great -- or just too many great ones -- you can make homemade Catalina dressing, too: puree and strain the tomatoes (the straining is optional) and cook down until they start to thicken like a pasta sauce.  Add equal parts sugar and vinegar, season with salt and Worcestershire sauce until slightly too salty, add a good dose of smoked paprika, and then toss in the Cuisinart and slowly add oil until it's the consistency of salad dressing (expect to add about twice as much oil as vinegar).  Ideally, refrigerate for a day or two before using.

Underused tomato condiment: soy sauce, especially the lighter Japanese style soy sauce used with sushi.

And of course, there is the simplest tomato sandwich in the world: split a baguette, butter it, broil it, and rub a split tomato on the broiled surface, squeezing the tomato guts onto it.  Top with coarse salt.