Tag: Green Tomatoes

End of Season Green

I considered waiting to share this post until the fall, but then I thought why not now. This is the perfect idea to share now while you’re still deciding what you are putting into the ground or containers for this growing season.

If you have some tomatoes planted and wondering if you should plant more, the answer is a resounding yes!

I’ve mentioned before that last year, the growing season here in the Pacific Northwest was horrible. Nothing really took off until the end of June and the beginning of July. And I was concerned with my tomatoes. If fact, the above picture was the last of the tomatoes that I took off the vine at the beginning of October!

As you can see, there were so many green tomatoes that I still had, but my plants were dying off. So instead of all these beauties, I brought them inside and found a recipe that has now entered my MUST make every year when I bring the tomatoes in.

But I wanted to share this recipe with you now, because this is worth planting the extra tomato plants that you’re debating about adding to your garden.

If you’re like our families, you grow enough tomatoes to make your tomato sauce, pizza sauce, tomato soup, salsa or other tomato product you store for the winter. (This year I’m going to add making our out ketchup and tomato paste.) You definitely want to add Green Tomato Relish to your list!

I tried this last year not just because I had a plethora of green tomatoes, but also because my husband loves relish and I hate pickles. So I gave this a test drive to see if I could make something that is on his list of condiments and yet is something that I will eat as well. And I tell you that this hit the spot for everyone!

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OurHalfAcreHomestead Green Tomato Relish

Mrs. Volfie posted her Green Tomato Relish here, but for your convenience I’m leaving the directions she walks through below. Please note, that if for your first time you don’t have the celery seed in your cupboard you are still going to have an amazing relish without it. I now have celery seed in my kitchen so I can’t wait to see how much better it turns out.

This is the vegetable ratio that Mrs. Volfie talks about in her recipe. You can mutiply it according to how many green tomatoes that you have.

  • 2 C Green Tomatoes, minced
  • 2 C Onions, minced
  • 1 C Sweet Peppers, minced

The Base for this recipe is 5 Cups of produce.

As you can see here, I used red onions instead of the yellow onions that Mrs. Volfie used. They are just my personal favorite onion, but please feel free to use the onions that you have on hand. I also want to mention that I was about a half cup short of the minced peppers and I still instantly fell in love with this recipe. Just remember that if you’re light in one vegetable, you should try to make up for it with one of the other vegetables.

I didn’t and I ended up with a slightly wetter finished product than I would have liked. But that is okay. Having run this recipe and knowing what the outcome is and what my personal expectations were, I know that this next batch that I make, I’ll make sure to keep that 5 Cups Base ratio and I’ll go a little lighter on the liquid, but I’m ahead of myself.

Let’s move forward.

This is a 2 day project. On first day, you’re going to mince your vegetables and let it sit over night. The next day you’re going to cook and bottle or jar your relish. And as a busy mom, I sure do love recipes that I can break up into steps like this and not have to take an entire day to run a canner.

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Day One

  1. Mince your vegetables to make up your Base Unit. (In the video Mrs. Volfie made a triple batch, which is a total of 15 Cups of produce.) I didn’t have the chopping tool that Mrs. Volfie used, so I minced by hand.
  2. Combine your vegetables and add 2 Tbsp of Pickling Salt. If you are running less or more of a Base Batch, you may need to adjust the amount of salt used accordingly. (The purpose of the salt is to soften the vegetables but also reduce some of the water content.)
  3. Put the raw relish in your refrigerator overnight.

Day Two

  1. Strain and rinse off your relish.
  2. Put back into the pot and add the following. (This is for a triple batch, so please adjust these ingredients according to the Base Batch of recipe that you’re running.)
    • 2 C Sugar (Mrs. Volfie mentions that she prefers brown sugar. I just used cane so can’t comment on the difference in flavors.)
    • 2 C Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
    • 2 tsp. Salt
    • 1 tsp. Celery Seed
    • Fresh Cracked Black Pepper
  3. Bring to a boil on your stovetop.
  4. Fill hot jars or bottles with the relish with 1″ headspace and de-bubble.
  5. Hot Water Bath the relish for 15-20 minutes.

For Christmas, my husband and I gifted this relish to friends and loved ones. And everyone came back raving about it. Not only that, but have talked with their loved ones who are also interested in this relish.

You won’t hear this in the video, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this relish makes the BEST tartar sauce just by mixing in your favorite mayonnaise. Everyone I’ve told that to in person just gave me the humored head nod that said, “so you say. I might give it a try.” Everyone did try and they came back with fireworks in their eyes.

Living in the Pacific Northwest, we are spoiled with fresh seafood. So of course when anyone talks about tartar sauce, people get a little snobby. But please, please, please, give this a try. Because I have yet to have someone come back to me and tell me that it did not hit the spot.

And if you are planning a special event, are a caterer, and seafood is on the menu I am telling you that this one condiment is the way to wow your customers and come back with glowing revues!

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Other recipes that may interest you…

I have not yet tried these recipes, but these are on the top of my to try list.

Ketchup

The ingredients on this recipe from Self Sufficient Me sounds about right for what I look for in a ketchup. The written recipe is found here.

There is one glaring issue that I have with this recipe by watching the video is that it is too thin and liquid based for the type of ketchup my family likes. The culprit for this being so runny is that he runs his tomatoes through a food processor at the very beginning.

I was teaching a small class on how to make tomato sauce and we found out the hard way that when you process tomatoes like this you just can’t ever get that sauce to thicken up! The reason for this is because there is a chemical in the skin of tomatoes that when you release (by blitzing the tomatoes) it counteracts the pectin that is naturally in the tomatoes. You end up with tomato juice.

So to prevent the thinning of your tomato product, you really do not want to cut the tomato more than you have to. Small tomatoes cut in half. Large tomatoes cut into quarters. The pectin inside the tomatoes will thicken your sauce and minimize your time in front of a hot stove.

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Tomato Paste

While I do have a few Italian Nona’s that I love watching on YouTube for inspiration, I want to try this Turkish recipe for making a tomato paste. With Turkish Food Travel, you can watch her video here or written recipe here.

A quick walking away point from this is that you notice that the pectin inside the tomatoes are at work in making this a thick sauce to start with. Then you keep the pan on the heat much longer than you would for a chunky tomato/pasta sauce. So if you’re making your own pasta sauce already, to make a paste you keep cooking the sauce down until you cook the vast majority of the liquid out.

I like how this recipe uses salt to reduce the tomato liquid even before you start cooking. This has inspired me to prep the tomatoes the night before I want to cook the paste, so the salt can maximize its extraction time.

At the end of the video you will hear about the method of making tomato paste by cooking it in the sun. Even though there was not enough description here, it sounds very similar to what I’ve heard is done in Italy. There are wooden tables that are used to make the paste. From what I understand, the sauce is first made and then spread across the wooden table. The sun dehydrates the tomatoes for you to make the paste. The only thing you do during this process is to use a scraper or a bench knife and mix the sauce/paste so that everything dehydrates/dries in the sun at an even rate.

If you are Italian, Turkish, or any nationality that makes a tomato paste using the sun, please comment below on the process that you use. Because I want to know how you do it. Making tomato paste by sun is on my cooking bucket list (I want to try this at least one time during my life).

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Too Busy? Here’s some quick condiments that can fit in your busy life.

I just came across Becoming A Farm Girl and I’m excited to see what she has in store to share with the world. Here is her video on 7 Quick Condements. I love listening to Cassandra. Her approach for making mayonnaise is the easiest method that I’ve seen to date. And she’s made me super excited to make this the next time I run out of mayo. We’ve been meaning to make our own because of a couple of ingredients that have made their way onto the ingredient labels of commercial mayo.

To get her print out recipes you will need to sign up to Cassandra’s email list. The link to that is in the details of the video linked above. I did sign up to get this recipe book and it is beyond what I’ve received from others. So, if you’re picky about who you sign up for, I absolutely did not regret signing up for this one.

Looking for a tool to make your food prep easier?

This is an affiliate link to mentioned product. We may receive a commission on this product, purchased through this link, but at no extra cost to you. This item is from Amazon but may be purchased at local markets.

Vidalia Chop Wizard Pro Max

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Relish for the Non Pickle People!

This was one wild ride for the growing season for my little garden this year. Here in the Pacific Northwest we had absolutely no spring, just an extended winter until June.

Normally we can start planting things as early as April. Most home gardeners wait until Mother’s Day to plant starts out into the garden. May is when all surprise freezes are no longer a possibility. So you can imagine the thoughts running through my head when halfway through June we still hadn’t broke past the 60’s. I even planted double my usual tomatoes because it looked like the grow season was going to be that far off of the norm and we were not going to get as many tomatoes.

Hope returned when August showed summer in all its gardening glory and continued through September. Usually September is our Indian summer. But the beautiful weather continued all the way through October. Actually traditionally cool and rainy October kicked in that last week.

All this time I left my tomatoes going. There were so many green tomatoes and I hoped beyond hoped that they would turn red on the vine before we lost our extended summer.

This first week of November was when I had to pull the plug. And that meant I had somewhere around 6-7 quarts of green tomatoes–hands down the most green tomatoes that I’ve ever had to figure out what I was going to do with them. Mind you, I didn’t grow up where fried green tomatoes or green tomato sandwiches were common place. I know of these things, but they were never part of my childhood diet.

Looking up green tomato recipes, there was one that stood out–Green Tomato Relish.

I am not a pickle person. That’s story for another time. But I married a pickle person (who by chance isn’t a tomato person…and I am!) who loves pickles and especially relish. I figured that I would can some green tomato relish for him so that he had some homemade condiments that were right up his alley.

From what I found time and again with green tomato relish recipes is that it’s comparable to pickle relish and several people commented about how they preferred it over pickle relish. That caught my curiosity!

As I began to read through several different recipes I saw most of them were very similar in ingredients to fresh salsa. I love salsa!

Then the thought hit me that maybe, just maybe there is a relish in the world that a non-pickle person would like. (And when I say I don’t like pickles, I mean that I can pick pickles off a restaurant burger and taste exactly where they were place on the patty just by the residual brine that was left behind.)

I used this video from OurHalfAcreHomestead, Green Tomato Relish 2018. Besides the fact that I had nearly all the ingredients in my kitchen already, the huge selling point for me is that Miss Volfie is my kind of woman! The way that she cooks is how I cook (you make things so frequently that you go off of the recipe in your head). It was how I was taught to cook and how my dad was taught to cook. So this cooking technique automatically flips a switch in my head that starts the fanfare that this woman knows what she’s talking about. She’s not after the fame and money but honestly passing on what she knows best.

I highly recommend that you watch the video. But in the case that you just want the recipe and steps without the talk, here it is.

Green Tomato Relish

Miss Volfie’s batch is broken down to this ratio:

  • 2 Cups Green Tomatoes
  • 2 Cups Onions
  • 1 Cup other Vegetable (Sweet Bell Pepper in this instance)

I love this ratio because it’s easy to make you “batch” based off of the amount of green tomatoes that you have. No need to be short or waste what you have on hand. Your green tomatoes are literally your limiting factor.

(This is the measurements that were used for a triple batch)

  1. Mince your Tomatoes, Onions, and Bell Peppers
  2. Sprinkles about 2 Tbsp of salt over your vegetables and let the salt extract the water from the vegetables over night.
  3. (Next Day) Prep your jars for water bath canning your relish.
  4. Add your vegetables to a colander.
  5. Rinse the excess salt off your vegetables and drain them off.
  6. In your stock pot add the following seasonings: *2 cups sugar, *2 cups cider vinegar, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp mustard powder, 1 tsp celery seed, fresh cracked pepper.
  7. Bring to a boil.
  8. Bottle and put in water bath canner.
  9. Process for 10 minutes.
  10. Cool

Modifications and Verification of Safe Canning

I’ve been teaching some safe canning classes for people who want to learn this skill for the first time. I’m also part of a few communities where I see the debate of safe and not safe recipes more often than I care to admit. Most arguments seem to be around processing times. So if you are a higher elevation, 10 minute processing time is not going to be enough. If you are a low elevation, I only need to process the tomatoes for 5 minutes.

When in doubt, always be mindful of your elevation and go to a trusted source for processing times.

For example, I wanted to verify if this recipe was a safe recipe or just a family recipe that hasn’t changed with updated food safety research. Other than processing time, the other important bit of information to verify is the acidity (the ratio of tomatoes to other ingredients and the added vinegar).

I found a very similar recipe at the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP), Pickled Green Tomato Relish. The most notable difference between these two recipes is that the NCHFP actually lists cornstarch as an ingredient. Flour and cornstarch are on the list for things not to add to recipes for home canning (with the exception of Clear Gel, which is a modified cornstarch that was created for canning–but this isn’t what’s listed in this recipe).

Cornstarch is a thickening agent. And from my experience in the kitchen I can only assume that the cornstarch was listed in this recipe to thicken the relish juice. Even though the NCHFP is a trusted source for safe canning practices, this is one instance where I am NOT comfortable in following their recipe.

Nobody likes a soupy relish, so here’s how I made my modification. Safe canning means that a certain amount of 5% acid (vinegar) needs to be added to counter the water content of the recipe. Miss Volfie did strain her vegetables, but there was obviously going to be a bit of water content still left–her vegetables were sitting in their juices over night and I think there was a shake in her straining before she potted her vegetables.

With my colander, I added a muslin cloth inside before adding my vegetables. I rinse and strained them. Then I picked up the muslin and compress strained the excess water out of the vegetables. There were several cups of water that I extracted out of my vegetables that would have been otherwise added, thus diluting the 5% Apple Cider Vinegar to a lower acid percentage.

Because I did extract the extra water from my vegetables, an additional step not taken by Miss Volfie or the NCHFP, I had no problem in following Miss Volfie’s lead in slightly reducing the vinegar and sugar volume. (My tomatoes were enough for a 7 batch and I added 4 cups of vinegar–slightly more vegetable weight than the NCHFP recipe, the same vinegar measurement, plus less water content from the straining step, and minus the cornstarch for thickening.)

Now I do agree with the NCHFP for simmering for 5 minutes once the relish comes to a boil. Some people will say 10-20 minutes, but the goal is to get the relish up to a hot temperature so that the center of your jar reaches proper temperature while processing. So I did modify Miss Volfie’s recipe by simmering those extra few minutes.

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Here’s the walking away point.

Understand what the science is saying about processing your food for preservation. Food preservation is not just packaging to put food on your shelf. There is microscopic life that we share our world and food with. Safe canning isn’t about being a kill joy. It’s about understanding the world we live in and the food we share with other life forms. It’s about understanding how to create an environment, inside our food, that prevents these bacteria from taking over and leaving us with their food waste that makes us sick.

So look for those recipes that interest you. Check and verify those recipes with the people who spend their occupational lives studying in this area. Are they going to be right? Yes. And sometimes they do something that’s questionable. Go by what you know and at the same time get up to date on new information that’s found. Make your judgments based off of what risks you are comfortable with. And be prepared to answer and describe your thought process.

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Now the Fun Part… how did it turn out???

My pickle loving husband couldn’t wait to try what I made, thinking of him. In fact, while I was cooking the relish to jar up, he has already planned out that we were going to have burgers. Let’s face it, my man adds so much relish that you think a burger bleeds relish!

Off he went to the store to pick up ground beef. But he returned with fish sticks because our 6 year old went to the store with him and they decided that the best price by weight was fish over beef. (The things and decisions that come from my family LOL.)

Once the relish was finished processing (one jar was not up to proper head space, but I still processed it so I would know how the vegetable texture would come out and the blend of flavors) I popped open the not-safe jar and taste tested the Green Tomato Relish.

First Impression–It’s not pickle tasting. That’s a win.

Second Impression–It doesn’t fresh or cooked salsa. The Apple Cider Vinegar adds a tartness that just isn’t present in a salsa. That’s a pass.

Can I eat this? Yes.

Will I go out of my way to eat this? Probably not.

What about my pickle loving husband? Will he be okay if we move forward in our married life with this relish and not buy store bought pickle relish again in the future? Maybe. I didn’t ask him that specific question.

However, I did ask him what he thought. He said it tasted good and he ruminated on the flavors going on in his mouth. He said next time he would probably add more vinegar.

So the next time that I make this recipe I won’t go light on the sugar and vinegar ratio to keep the relish less soupy. I’m not in love with this recipe enough to put my foot down and claim it as a favorite and it has to be this way because I’m making it for me. I’m still making this for my husband. So I’ll add the vinegar next time to see if it has a better flavor to him.

That being said… THIS IS WHAT I ABSOLUTELY LOVE ABOUT THIS RECIPE!

You remember that I said that my husband came home with fish?

I took this tomato relish and mixed it with mayonnaise to make a homemade tartar sauce. (Yes, this pickle hater is a tartar sauce snob. Yes, I’m aware it has pickles in it. And this is the exception to the rule of my hate for pickles.) This was by far the BEST tartar sauce that I have ever had. It was just the right combination of sour to creamy to crunchy ratio!

My husband and I do agree on one thing pickle related…the best tartar sauce. We both grew up eating fish from the Skipper’s chain of seafood restaurants. They had the world’s best tartar sauce. And when the chain shut down and we were no longer able to buy fish from them, we had a massive hole in our hearts for what tartar sauce to buy for when we cook fish at home. NONE of the brands in the grocery store came close to our favorite.

THIS homemade tartar sauce is NOW MY NEW FAVORITE! This Green Tomato Relish with just some mayonnaise is all we need to have the happy happy love love all over again for tartar sauce. And let’s just say that I laughed when my husband gave me the face for taking the last of the homemade sauce. He took the jar of whatever was in the fridge and made a gagging sound when he tasted it. Funnier still he searched the jar for the pull date to see if it had gone bad. Nope… it was still “good”. But it’s no longer consumable now that we have our replacement tartar sauce.

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For My Fellow Pickle Haters…

Should you make Green Tomato Relish?

If you have a pickle lover that you life with, then yes! Kissing them after they eat Green Tomato Relish, you’re not going to gag over that pickle aftertaste.

If you happen to want a fish or seafood condiment that you will actually eat, definitely!

This recipe is far enough removed from the dreaded pickle that you can appreciate this recipe.

Even if you are not a relish condiment consumer, this recipe is worth having on your shelf or in your fridge. You can make your own tartar sauce. Of I recently fell in love with German Pickle Soup. I had no intention of ever making it, but was willing to order it at my local Bavarian restaurant. NOW, I will most definitely search out a pickle soup recipe that I can substitute out the pickles for this green tomato recipe.

I hope you make this recipe. When you do, please comment below and let me know what you think.

If you’re a pickle hater and have concerns about a specific flavor profile, ask all your questions below in the be comments and I’ll let you know my opinion.

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