tomatoes | Live For Pizza

May 13, 2013May 13, 2013

Green Tomato And Apple Relish

Tomato season is over, just a few stragglers on the vines plus a few that will never ripen now. Yesterday I helped pull down the plants and trellis from my mums tomato patch to make room for something else. I came home with a big box of green/orange/red tomatoes for making delicious green tomato relish. Its great having a few jars of homemade chutney and relish around – they keep well in or out of the fridge because of the vinegar. A sandwich made with this relish on good bread with a nice sharp aged cheddar is heaven!

I based my recipe on Stephanie Alexander’s indispensable The Cooks Companion, but I added apples too since I have some nice ones to use. This is a spicy relish with lots of subtle flavours, but you can change the spices around as you like. Cumin is great in chutneys and relishes so often I use that too.

Ingredients

1kg (2lb) tomatoes – a mixture of green and ripe ones. All ripe tomatoes can be used too for a richer sauce. If you can’t find green tomatoes any supermarket ones will do. See what I did there?
1/2 kg (1lb) apples
1/3 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp seeded mustard
2 tsp Garam Masala
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cornflour
1 pinch powdered clove
1 pinch chilli flakes
1 pinch turmeric powder

Variations

Not everyone likes sultanas in relish but if you do, add half a cup. If you have vincotto, add 1-2 tsp for a hint of sultana and caramel sweetness.

Method

Slice tomatoes and onions. Peel, core and slice apples. It’s easy to nip out the stem bit of each tomato with the end of a knife but not essential.

Tip all ingredients except the cornflour into a large saucepan.

Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook for around an hour, stirring every 10 minutes to check it isn’t sticking. Most of the free liquid should be reduced.

Mix the cornflour with about 1 tbsp water and stir well. Spoon out a little liquid from the sauce and mix with the cornflour paste. Tip the mixture back into the sauce pot and stir well. Simmer for a few more minutes.

Remove from the heat. Use a stick blender to break up any larger lumps, but don’t puree it too much – leave some texture.

Taste for sweet/sour balance and if necessary add a little more vinegar or sugar to taste.

Pour into sterile jars – an easy way to sterilise jars is to run them through the dishwasher. The vinegar in a relish makes it unlikely to spoil, so you don’t need to boil the full jars like you would if canning vegetables. If you want to be extra cautious put the jars in a large saucepan, tip in hot water nearly to the top of the jars and simmer for 30 minutes. I always put a tea towel under the jars when doing this so the jars don’t jump around and crack.

If you liked this…

A Quick Guide to Making Preserves

Home-Made Pickles, Chutneys & Relishes: A practical guide to making delicious preserves at home

March 17, 2013December 10, 2019

Canning Tomato Passata

The end of summer is a delicious time. The last month or two we have had tons of zucchinis, eggplant, onions, apples, peaches and more but just maybe the most delicious – beautiful tomatoes. We eat as many as we can and bottle the rest as sauce. I can’t recommend this enough – if you can start with good, ripe tomatoes and make a simple sauce the difference between home made and bought sauces is mind blowing.

If you’re growing your own tomatoes it makes sense to save up as many as possible and do one big sauce making session. This usually means picking as they ripen and storing in the fridge for a few days while stocks slowly build up. When we haven’t grown our own some years we have bought a few boxes from farmers markets or grocers.

The best way we’ve found to make a simple sauce is to simmer the tomatoes in big pots until just soft, then let them sit in a colander for a minute to drain. Or you could try the approach of roasting your tomatoes first – this does look pretty tasty I admit! After cooking, use a tomato mill like the one I reviewed here last year or a mouli (vegetable mill) to get the skin and seeds out. You can jar them at this point but you’ll probably end up with quite a runny sauce, which will separate in the jars. This isn’t such a bad thing but this year we took our sauce and simmered it over low heat for a few hours, until reduced in volume by about a quarter. The taste of this reduced sauce… I’m drooling again thinking about it.

There are lots of different styles of jars for preserving or ‘canning’ vegetables. Although expensive new, we have found many crates of them at garage sales and op shops for a fraction of the price – just make sure you can still get the rings and lids for whichever ones you get. We use Fowlers brand jars as the parts are available new if you need them. To use these jars you fill to about an inch from the top, and slip over a rubber seal, the lid and a clip to hold it down. Before we got jars we used long neck beer bottles with crown caps from a homebrew store, and you can save and reuse any jars or bottles as long as they have good metal lids.

When full put all of your jars in a big stock pot and add water to just below the lids and slowly bring to a low boil. I boil the jars for an hour, then let them cool slowly in the hot water to be on the safe side.

tomato sauce (1 of 1)-4 — Here’s how the seal should sit on the jar – these are a bit fiddly to get on but you soon get the hang of flicking the twists with your thumb to straighten them up.

If you have a dedicated ‘Vacola’ pot for boiling the jars, it has a raised platform in the bottom so that the jars aren’t right on the hot bottom of the pot. If you’re using a stock pot, bring to the heat slowly or the jars can crack – either from the heat or bubbles jittering them around. I’ve seen people put rags or tea towels on the bottom to stop this happening.

tomato sauce (1 of 1)-5 — Another batch of sauce ready to boil.

If you’ve been making sauce all day and need a quick meal, take a ladle full of your fresh sauce, grind in a little salt and pepper, cook up whatever pasta you have lying around – thick shapes like spirals work well but anything goes and hit it with the sauce. Grate a little parmesan on top if you have it. Might not look like much but the clean flavours and textures are so good.

Mouli on Amazon (or try second hand shops) – this is a good, cheap option for making smaller batches of sauce.

The Squeezo – I covet this after reading eatatdixiebelles post about it

January 18, 2011June 7, 2013

Fresh Tomato Pizza Sauce

When tomatoes are in season it’s nice to make a pizza sauce with good, ripe freshly picked ones. There’s maybe less of the rich cooked tomato flavour in the sauce, but more fresh, zingy flavour. I like to use fresh herbs in fresh tomato sauce – thyme in particular.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Drop in a few tomatoes at a time and cook until the skins start to crack, or feel loose when prodded with a spatula. Remove the tomatoes to a strainer and repeat until all tomatoes are cooked.

pizza sauce-2 — Simmered tomatoes, ready to be pulped

I use a tomato mill as detailed here to remove the seeds and skins. A mouli/food mill can also be used. If none of these tools are available just peel the skins off by hand and mash or blend the tomatoes. The sauce at this point tastes amazing (if you made lots, try splashing a little onto some spaghetti for a snack!) but it might be too runny to use for pizza sauce. It can be thickened either by simmering over medium heat until thick or just straining the pulp through a sieve, which works surprisingly well! If you sieve the pulp, save the runny juice for soups or something.

pizza sauce-3 — Separating the tomato pulp from the juice

Add fresh herbs and a little salt to taste before using on pizza. This sauce can also be preserved in jars or bottles.

August 9, 2009March 21, 2013

Leek, Tomato and Mushroom with Stracchino

I cooked a bit of an unusual pizza recently on a whim, and it turned out pretty well! I was inspired by a new (to me) cheese that I found at the markets. It’s called Stracchino, and is a soft cows milk cheese. It has a lovely delicate flavour with a hint of sweetness combined with a little tangy-ness. It melts amazingly, turning into a soft, sticky and creamy puddle.

I wanted to match this up with some ingredients that would complement the sweet cheese as well as something to contrast with the sweet flavours. This is what I came up with. The sweetness of cooked leeks is nice with this cheese and the contrasting texture of slightly crunchy/slippery leek with the smooth melted Stracchino worked well. Pieces of tomato and mushroom are little bursts of intense flavour to contrast with the smooth sweetness of the cheese and leek.

Ingredients

Pizza dough (I made one massive pizza with a 500g dough ball, you could also make 2 smaller ones with these quantities of toppings)
Pizza sauce
2 Leeks
Good handful of button Swiss brown mushrooms
2 Ripe tomatoes, diced
Paprika
300g or so Stracchino. You could use mozzarella if you absolutely can’t find this, it will still work well with these toppings

Method

Cut the green tops off the leeks and discard. Wash the leeks well. Dice and saute in olive oil with one crushed clove of garlic until translucent.
Tip the mushrooms into a hot pan, and leave them to cook until starting to brown, shaking to stop them burning.
Shape your pizza base and spread with a thin layer of sauce.
Scatter a few pinches of paprika over the tomato sauce. It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between a good quality paprika versus the ones I have tried from supermarkets!
Scatter the leek mixture evenly over the base.
Slice the cheese and tear each slice into chunks. Scatter evenly over the pizza. Make sure to leave some gaps so that the crust doesn’t get too moist.
Now scatter over the mushrooms and diced tomatoes. Don’t overdo it – a good guide is to end up with around 2 pieces of each per slice, on average.
Cook on a preheated pizza stone or any other cooking method of your choice.

June 23, 2009June 6, 2013

Basic Pizza Sauce From Tinned Tomatoes

Some people like a rich sauce with herbs and garlic, some like an ultra simple sauce with nothing but tomato – the DOC standard (which dictates how traditional Italian pizza is made) is to use nothing but crushed tinned San Marzano tomatoes. There’s a lot of opinions about what makes a good pizza sauce and of course no one recipe to rule them all – if it tastes good to you, then it’s ‘right’ (unless you simply must have a DOC pizza of course…). For me a fairly simple sauce with just a hint of extra herbs is best, a good burst of tomato acidity and sweetness that still lets the other ingredients shine through.

1 Tin of good tomatoes, preferably skinned whole tomatoes. San Marzano are traditional but there’s good and bad brands like everything else. A good tin of generic plum tomatoes is much nicer than a bad tin of San Marzanos. If you make pasta or pizza sauce regularly it is worth buying a few different brands that are easy to find in your area and comparing them to find the nicest.
1 generous pinch of dried oregano – the good stuff is sometimes sold as ‘Mediterranean oregano’, an olive/tan colour with a pungent aroma from the dried flowers.
1 generous pinch of salt

Tip all ingredients into a bowl and use a stick blender to briefly pulse and break up the whole tomatoes. Don’t overdo the blending – a little texture in the sauce is nice. If you don’t want to use a blender, use kitchen scissors to snip the whole tomatoes into pieces or just squish them with a spatula or even with bare hands. Good tinned tomatoes shouldn’t taste bitter but if yours do, add a little pinch of sugar to the sauce for balance. You might also find that the taste of some tinned tomatoes is a little dull or flat – in this case 1 tsp of lemon juice can give a lift.

Tag: tomatoes