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September 14 ..is a terrible thing to wasteToo many tomatoes? How about a tomato juice recipe that can be used to drink straight, make a bloody mary, or begin a simple red sauce for a pasta dish? This procedure is hardly worth the effort for a few dozen tomatoes, but if you have a few paper grocery bags full of them and a 10-12 gallon soup pot and the freezer space to store the finished product it is a good alternative to canning which I don't have the space, equipment, or ambition to do.
Wash and rinse all the tomatoes. Get a big, non-reactive soup pot that will hold them all. Tomatoes contain acid which corrodes cast iron and aluminum. Don't use cook pots made of either one of these metals. Exended cooking in either iron or aluminum pots gives a metallic, nasty flavor to tomato products. Use stainless steel or enamel coated cast iron or ceramic only. Cut all your tomatoes into quarters, removing any white or green spots, worm holes, stems, and jelly-like soft spots and fill the big pot with tomato chunks. No need to take off the skin or remove the seeds. We'll take care of that later. If you want the flavors of celery, carrot, or onion, cut them into large pieces and add them to the pot. I also add whole, rinsed parsley stems - the inedible stuff that you usually throw away (the more the better) and a couple of bay leaves. I don't recommend adding basil at this stage. I find that basil gets bitter and overwhelming when added early to a long, slow cook. I prefer to add it just before serving. When the pot is full to overflowing add about 2 teaspoons of salt to help draw out the juice from the veggies, cover, and put on medium heat. Stir every 10 minutes or so to prevent sticking/burning until the juices flow freely and the whole thing comes to the boil. Simmer covered for 20-40 minutes at which time the pot's contents will have reduced by to about 3/4 and all the tomatoes and veggies will have turned to a soft, mushy mass.
Grab another non-reactive pot (smaller than the one you used for the initial cooking) and use a food mill (looks like a saucepan with holes in the bottom and a crank handle - available from a flea market or a cooking supply house) or a wire basket and a spatula to strain all the hot tomato/veggie juice through. All the tomato seeds & skin, parsley stems, and carrot and celery fiber will be left behind for disposal, while only the juice and some fine puree will enter the second pot. When all the contents of the first pot have been strained into the second, simmer the resulting puree for 2-4 hours uncovered on low heat to reduce it by half. Stir occasionally to prevent it from burning or sticking to the bottom of the pot.
Cool, chill, spoon into quart zip-lock bags, and put 3-4 sealed quart bags into a gallon zip-lock (in case one of the quart bags leak). Put the gallon bags into the freezer.
If sauce is wanted later, remove a quart bag and add to whatever else you usually add... onions, garlic, sausage, a piece of pork, capers, wine, anchovies, olives, sun-dried or fresh or canned tomatoes...
I boiled down 10 gallons of tomatoes yesterday and ended up with just over 1 gallon of sauce.
Happy harvest.
September 05 You Want Oenogarum With That Burger?Here in the land of Heinz ketchup and cheap yellow supermarket mustard we grow soybeans mainly as an animal feed. Over 2,000 years ago the Chinese discovered how to ferment soybeans into a tasty high-protein product that was the ancestor of soy sauce (the liquid component) and miso/fermented bean paste (the solid part.) Then there is tofu, a food rather than a condiment, and a wonderful source of protein made from unfermented soybeans which is a pain in the ass to make. I tried it once and will never do it again. It was great but it took all day and used every pot and pan I own. Too much about tofu. This is about condiments. Three cheers to the ancient Chinese for inventing a savory use for the bland, uninteresting soybean.
On to the Roman Empire. The Romans have received much negative press about the sorry state of their diet. I'm sure that's true to a certain extent, especially for the slaves and the poor Roman trailer trash, but they did produce and market a surprising substance called garum used as a condiment. A third century A.D. recipe says it is made by alternating layers of small fatty fish (anchovies, sardines, mackerel) with salt and other ingredients in 10 gallon containers, letting it sit in the sun for 7 days and then stirring it daily for 20 days at which time it will be mostly liquid. This is almost exactly the same technique for making fish sauce, a staple of Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam. This dark, salty, fishy sauce was used by the Romans as on meat and vegetables. Roman authors and modern archaeological evidence indicate that several types of garum were marketed by the Romans. One was made from any ocean dweller, one for the poor from entrails, heads and bones, and one made only from creatures with fins and scales living in the sea without the addition of shellfish or eels made specifically for the Jewish consumer. I remember a Latin teacher once telling me that the Romans ate rotted fish guts and liked it. Salted fermented fish is not rotten, just as sauerkraut is not rotten cabbage or pickles are rotten cucumbers. Anyway, garum added to wine which has been reduced to 3/4 to 1/2 its original volume is called oenogarum, and was a common condiment. I just found this out recently and it surprised me because I like to make an arabic dish of hamburgers mixed with garlic and parsley, browned in olive oil, and then braised in wine, lemon juice, and a few anchovies. Sounds like back-door oenogarum burgers to me.
As a historical, hysterical side-bar, the Romans took their garum to India via the spice and silk routes. Over the next few hundred years the Indians added tamarind (a tart, savory fruit) and other ingredients which the British discovered in the 19th century and took home with them. They called it Worcestershire sauce.
The next time you shake a few drops of Worcestershire into your beef stew or pork ribs, marvel at how ancient Roman "rotted fish guts" evolved over the centuries and thousands of miles to become just another condiment that we don't think twice about munching. |
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