Zia Anna’s Preserved Green Tomatoes
This is a fantastic recipe for using up green tomatoes. The quantities will depend on the
amount you have, so let this be an instruction rather than a recipe. Unlike a chutney, you can
use preserved tomatoes straight away. They are quite sweet and sour, so great with porchetta
(Roman roast pork with fennel seeds and garlic) or a good bread.
For every 2 kg green tomatoes you will need about 1 kg table salt, 3 onions, 3 celery sticks (both chopped
chunkily), 250 ml average balsamic vinegar, sugar, olive oil
First, clean the toms and cut them into nice meaty slices, without seeds. Then pour some
salt into a large sieve and add the tomato slices together with more salt. Now put a weight on
the whole tomato/salt thing. I use a clean container half full of water, but you could use a plate
with a weight on it. Leave the tomatoes overnight to dry out, then wash them to remove the salt
and let them dry on the draining board.
When they are dry, boil the onions, tomatoes and celery for 10 minutes in the vinegar.
Put them into jars with a teaspoon of sugar and some salt to taste, as they will still need to be
seasoned. Make sure you get in as much of the mixture as you can and tap it down, but leave a
centimetre at the top so you can fill it with the olive oil. Put the lid on, turn the jar upside down
and then let it settle again right side up so you can see if it needs a further top-up. Then simply
seal the jars.
How to preserve foods in hermetically sealed jars:
This is such a simple skill, but one that is seldom used these days. We would rather freeze
things, or even throw them away, than preserve them in this way, yet many foods can be stored
for up to a year in this way, and the jars are reusable and don’t require electricity like freezers.
Place your ingredients into a jar with a suitable lid (although it’s extremely practical to reuse
jars, often the lids are very shallow and there is nothing worse when you go to boil the jars than
water leaking in and ruining the contents). Seal the jars hand-tight only, place them in a deep
saucepan and cover them with boiling water. If you don’t have a pan that’s deep enough, place a
plastic bowl over the pan (making sure it doesn’t burn on the gas), to trap the moisture and heat.
Put a tea towel in between the jars to stop them rattling and breaking against each other.
Simmer for 10 minutes but do not remove the jars until the water has cooled. You will then have
jars that are hermetically sealed.
*taken from the book ‘From Seed to plate’ by Paolo Arrigo, published by Simon and Schuster