Hot answers tagged tomatoes
29
Tomatoes grow on a vine. But it is possible to pick them unripe, ship them unripe (which is much easier than shipping ripe tomatoes), then gas them with ethylene at the destination. Ethylene acts as a plant hormone and causes ripening.
But tomatoes ripened in storage don't taste the same as vine ripened ones. The compounds a tomato builds are dependent on ...
16
Short answer: tomato sauce is a non-Newtonian fluid. Another interesting link can be found here.
Tomato sauce in an interesting creature. Think about ketchup. You try you shake some out and nothing. So you tap the bottle a little bit, still nothing. Tap it a little harder, and a little harder, and suddenly boom: a flood of ketchup. The "jumpiness" of tomato ...
12
Ditch the cream and onions, and don't use tomato paste. Take a whole bulb of garlic, peel the cloves and leave them whole.
Heat a cup of good olive oil over medium heat and add the garlic, stirring occasionally until very lightly brown and blistered: be careful not to burn it!
Then add 4 28oz cans of chopped/crushed Italian tomatoes and some chilli, being ...
11
This is generally true of thick sauces, particularly ones with low surface tension. When thick sauces boil, there's plenty of resistance to the bubbles rising, so they get bigger before they leave the bottom of the pot. When the bubbles do reach the surface and burst, they're big enough to throw sauce everywhere.
Since there's basically no surface tension ...
11
In the US at least, common canned tomato products include:
Paste, cooked down tomatoes, to the point where they are scoopable with a spoon but will not flow. Very thick, like peanut butter. Often sold in six or twelve ounce cans.
Pureee - cooked tomatoes that have been--well--pureeed, but are mostly at their natural density; also called crushed ...
11
Picking a tomato which is individually ugly isn't going to help you. It's still the same variety and grown, stored and shipped under the same conditions as the other tomatoes in the pile.
Try looking for a store (farmers' and ethnic markets are good for this) which has a whole bin of ugly tomatoes; those are a different variety and/or handled differently. ...
10
Many fruits (tomatoes being one) and vegetables are picked before they are ripe and then artificially ripened at their transport destination using artificial means like ethylene gas. This makes fruits and vegetables make it to the store and last longer there without spoiling, and is the reason we have many of our vegetables year-round. The down-side to this ...
9
No, it isn't safe, water bath canning is only safe for high-acid foods as the acid kills botulism. Low-acid food must be processed at 240F, 116C, and that can only be achieved in a pressure canner.
When you pressure cook the soup it kills the bacteria, however when you then transfer it to the sterilized jars it could be contaminated on the way, and then ...
7
Tomatoes aren't high acid, so they need the addition of vinegar or lemon juice in order to safely can with a hot water bath. Honestly, I'm not sure why you would want to make tomato sauce from canned tomatoes because for me, the whole point of canning tomatoes is because the tomatoes will otherwise go bad. But anyhow...
I recommend finding a tomato sauce ...
6
Generally, assuming a recipe in English, if you see the word order "3 pounds of tomatoes, cored" you should assume that you start with three pounds, and then core them. If you see "3 pounds of cored tomatoes", it suggests you should weigh them after coring.
However, the first is still rather imprecise, as the amount of impact from coring could depend on the ...
5
Tasty doesn't sell. Pretty does.
This is particularly true with tomatoes. Even if you can find ripe tomatoes in a store they will usually have inferior flavor. They weren't bred for flavor- they were bred to ship well.
As consumers we don't have a lot of choice when it comes to grocery store produce. You can try buying organic but that doesn't guarantee ...
4
I think caramelization might be the wrong word there. I would go for concentration. While some caramelization does occur around the rim of a pot of tomato sauce as the sauce reduces (and it's good to stir this residue into your sauce), the main increase in sweetness is due to a concentration of all things tomato-y as the water in the sauce evaporates.
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4
I do this at home frequently; start by thinly slicing your tomato (roma tomatoes work best, because they're much meatier) and drying. You can do this using a food dehydrator, or in an open oven with low heat. This will take 5-10 hours, depending upon your tomatoes.
After your tomato slices are dried COMPLETELY, place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them. ...
4
The coring of tomatoes has a lot more to do with tradition than any sound foundations; the seeds in tomatoes can be bitter (and of course will ruin the texture of a smooth gazpacho) but the pulp surrounding them that is also discarded is rich in umami containing compounds:
...
4
Pace @RossHolloway, the word gazpacho covers a wide variety of soups which have evolved from essentially bread soup. (In fact, they're not even all cold soups). In addition to the red gazpachos, which get their colour from tomato and pepper, there are white and green gazpachos (lists by colour in Spanish). You could try to find a recipe in English for ...
4
When you mention that you've specifically cooked it down until the onions are brown and the tomatos have lost most of their liquid, I'd say that you might be near a jam ... and there are plenty of recipes out there for tomato & onion jam. Most call for adding a bit of extra acid to it and/or extra sugar.
If you search for 'crostini con pomodori e ...
3
Even if there weren't issues of re-contamination (covered well by GdD), when you use your own recipe, its difficult to know the required processing time (it can generally only be determined by careful measurement with special equipment). So you may not have actually sterilized it when pressure cooking.
Is freezing an option for you? I suspect the soup would ...
3
It doesn't look like it'd make much difference to that recipe. The juice goes in right after the tomatoes, so it's not like they cook on their own significantly. The one thing you get out of adding the tomatoes first is a way to get them spread evenly around the pan without having to stir, so they're mostly on top of the onions and get gentler heat at first. ...
3
I wouldn't worry too much about your results not matching the picture.* If you got enjoyable results, enjoy them. However, some notes can be made about your concerns.
The bacon certainly isn't going to disappear -- no matter what you do (short of blending), you will always be able to see those bits.
The onions in the sauce shouldn't really be caramelized, ...
3
The PH scale ranges from 0 - 14 with the lower numbers being more acidic than the higher number. Canned tomatoes are generally around 3.5-4.5 on the acidic scale, in other words just above the half way point below neutral 7.
As long as your tomato based sauce is not left in your seasoned Kadai (as Kristina rightly points out) for a long timeframe and your ...
3
To replace the tomato juice your primary concerns will be the flavor component the tomato adds, as well as the textural element. Any numbers of vegetables, steamed then pureed will give you the texture; I would recommend cauliflower for creamy, butternut squash for smooth, or carrot for spicy dishes. In terms of subbing out tomato in gazpacho and trying to ...
3
This post is super old, you may not see my answer, but here ya go anyways:
Sixteen ounces of water is far too much. You should do equal parts of water and paste. I usually put just a little bit more than the full can of water and after seasoning, its perfect! May as well have come out of a prego jar!
3
This often happens when the tomatoes used are not fully mature. Although apparently are completely red, the parties less red lighten the sauce.
Alternatively, depends on the quality of tomatoes. The Native Americans tomatoes were yellow (hence the Italian name "golden apple" = "pomo d'oro" = "pomodoro"). Through the selections have become red. But remaining ...
2
If by "fresh tomato paste" you mean you're starting with raw tomatoes, that's probably your issue. Most tomatoes you grow in your garden or buy from the store are salad tomatoes - they're not meant for cooking, and will result in a watery sauce like you describe.
You want a "sauce" tomato. Roma tomatoes or almost any plum-shaped tomato work well. There are ...
2
While I don't grate tomatoes, I cut them much smaller than salads I see in restaurants, or on TV commercials for salad dressing. Typically I will cut the tomato into 4 wedges, and if it's large, cut each wedge into 2 thinner ones, then lay the wedge down on the board and cut it into 6 or 8 pieces about the size of a pea. Careful not to dislodge or lose the ...
2
When tomatoes are fried, you can see that the oil becomes coloured red - so at least some of the colour components are preferentially soluble in oil.
I will hazard a guess that, under the circumstances mentioned, the oil coats the tomato particles, and some of the colour migrates into it to give a red surface. Because the oil forms a coating, that coat will ...
2
I've made tomato-based dishes in my seasoned cast iron pans including spaghetti sauce and chili with no perceivable off-taste or damage to the pans' seasoning as long as I removed the food soon after cooking since prolonged exposure, from my experience, will affect the seasoning of the pan, if not also the flavor of the food.
2
I think of tomato sauce as the plain stuff in the cans, and marinara as the seasoned red sauce served on many Italian pasta dishes. But many people use the terms interchangeably it seems, and even many authentic Italian restaurants list tomato sauce on their menus where it's actually the delicious seasoned stuff.
I'm guessing that the Wikipedia article ...
2
In many countries, including the UK, tomatoes grown outdoors often will not ripen at all, due to a lack of sunshine at the right time. What gardeners usually do is pick the green or reddening tomatoes and leave them to ripen on a windowsill (or something similar). They may not taste as good as ones grown under glass. but they are better than ordinary ...
2
To contradict the other answers: the "vine-ripened" point is mostly moot. Your regular old comercial round red tomato variety has been bred for shelf-life for roughly forever, won't develop much flavour anyway, and most of whatever is left is probably lost in (refrigerated) transportation and storage even if they were picked ripe - I haven't found one that ...
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