Tomatoes Galore

"And now for your delectation, the delicious Tomatoes Galore will tickle your fancy with her juicy rendition of 'On Top of Old Smoky'…"

Forgive me, dear readers, but I'm in head-down tomato processing mode. I've got two baking trays of chopped tomatoes in the oven that need to come out in 30 minutes, so this is going to be quick. They're the tail end of 60 pounds of the red-ribbed beauties known as Astiana tomatoes from Ayers Creek Farm, the first round of the 150 pounds I plan to process (I know, crazy, right?) this year and squirrel away in the freezer for the winter.

Astiana tomatoes at Ayers Creek Farm.

Those tomatoes, with just the right balance of tart-to-sweet, the product of more than a decade of selecting for flavor, plant health and field-hardiness on the part of Carol and Anthony Boutard, began with a meal that the couple had in the Piedmont region of Italy. There they tasted a fresh tomato that Carol said they had to bring back to their organic farm in Gaston—Anthony would remind me that Italy's Piedmont is on roughly the same latitude as Oregon, meaning that the seeds could be adapted to our climate—and the story goes that she ran out to the dumpster behind the restaurant, diving in to gather enough seeds to bring back.

Roasted tomato soup (recipe below).

My method of roasting is super simple: preheat the oven to 400°, chop the tomatoes into quarters, load onto two sheet trays skin-side down and roast for an hour. Cool enough to pull most of the skins off (easiest by hand if you like chunky sauce; a food mill smooshes them too much for our uses), load into quart freezer bags and you're done.

Speaking of done, it's time to pull those tomatoes out of the oven. Here's a recipe for a fabulous tomato soup I made last year, one that I think rivals the best you're likely to have.

Creamy Roasted Tomato Soup

8 Tbsp. (1 stick) butter
2 med. onions, chopped fine
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 c. flour
2 qts. (8 c.) roasted tomatoes or 3 28-oz. cans crushed tomatoes with their juices
2 c. chicken broth
1 Tbsp. kosher salt plus more to taste
1 tsp. celery salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper

In a Dutch oven or large soup pot, melt butter over medium heat. Add onion and sauté until tender and translucent. Add garlic and continue to sauté 2 minutes. Add flour and stir, making sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan, for 3 minutes. Add broth, tomatoes, salt, celery salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 30 minutes, stirring frequently to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. Remove soup from heat and, using an immersion blender,  purée the soup thoroughly until smooth*. Add more salt to taste, if needed. Serve.

* I don't mind a little texture from any bits that don't get totally blended in, but if you want a completely silky smooth finished product, you can press it through a fine mesh sieve, which will catch any remaining seeds or other bits.

Tomatoes Ending…But Don't Toss 'Em!

If you're like me and your visits to the garden to check on your tomatoes are getting more infrequent, before you just give up and plow them under, grab a bowl or basket and pick those tired old bushes clean. I just went out to our back forty and picked enough ripe green Aunt Ruby tomatoes to roast and make two quarts that'll get bagged and frozen to use for something delicious later this winter.

You could also just toss the chopped up unripe tomatoes into a pot, cook them down and run them through a food mill for sauce. Freeze them as is, or put them in the oven at 200° for a few hours to make a paste to flavor all kinds of dishes.

And if I don't get too lazy and remember to do it, I'll make one more trip out before the rains come this weekend. Maybe I can even get Dave to make a green tomato sorbet with some…

Preserving Summer: Tomatoes

The avalanche started in mid-August, and now, in mid-September, it's pretty much over. The onslaught of roasting, bagging and freezing tomatoes that normally takes place in late fall—in posts from 2010-2013 it hit squarely in early October—began, as it did last year, in late August. If that's not enough of a hint about Oregon's "new normal," then just ask the vineyard owners who are experiencing their earliest grape harvest in history.

If you want to grab a box of tomatoes at the farmers' market, you can read about the Ayers Creek Farm method for making the planet's best tomato sauce or check out my lazy cook's version of oven roasted and frozen tomatoes. I'm (most likely) calling it quits with twenty-eight quarts of roasted lovelies resting comfortably in the freezer, so it looks like we're set for most of the coming winter's soups, braises and sauces. As Jackie Gleason used to say, "How sweet it is!"

Farm Bulletin: Getting Saucy with Tomatoes

In this essay contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm guides us through the process of making tomato sauce from his most excellent Astiana paste tomatoes, the descendants of an Italian variety, the seeds of which his wife, Carol, dug out of a compost pile during a trip to the Piedmont many years ago. I am a devoted fan of these tomatoes, and plan to freeze about 150 lbs. of them this year using this method. Oh, and Anthony has stated that present company is excepted when he refers to certain food writers. Whew.

We had several questions about making tomato sauce last week. Here are our thoughts. Despite what food writers stress, fully ripe or over-ripe fruit should be avoided for canning purposes, use these in a fresh sauce. (Another calumny of the present crop of food writers is that tomatoes instantly stop ripening when they are picked from the vine. This is absolute nonsense, foolish fussiness from people who are paid to know better but never seem to actually work with fruits, just write about them.) We find the brightest and most flavorful sauce comes from fruit on the near side of ripeness, a diversity of stages produces a more interesting sauce. Avoid the fixation on color; flavor is what counts come January. A high level of acidity assures a bright and flavorful sauce.

Picked at the "nicely pinked" stage…

We resist the Macbeth "boil and bubble, toil and trouble" approach to sauce making. Nothing is gained from the drama of watching and stirring the cauldron, and it leads to time wasted and an over-cooked sauce. (Akin to putting berries one-by-one, never touching, on a cookie sheet prior to putting them in the freezer when it is much easier to put the whole flat in instead.) Cooking does not concentrate the sauce, heat-facilitated evaporation does. Only at the canning stage is a higher heat briefly necessary.

…tomatoes can fully ripen within a couple of days.

We wipe off the whole tomatoes if needed, pierce them a few times with a knife and place them in a big oven pan. Mound them up as they will settle down as they cook, and sprinkle some salt over the top if desired, which helps preserve the color. Put the pan in a slow oven, around 200°F. You can leave them there for hours, or overnight. Periodically, we decant off the "nectar," the amber liquid that drains from the tomatoes. We put this into 1-quart canning jars as a stock for stews and soups. After the tomatoes have fully collapsed, we run them through a food mill. We also can some whole tomatoes.

At this point, the sauce is medium thick, and can be be canned. We also further concentrate some sauce by returning it to the low oven for a day or so. Slowly and gently, it will evaporate and thicken. We find this gentle heat produces a far better sauce than rushing the process over the stovetop flame. Commercial sauces are often made with a vacuum cooker which concentrates the sauce quickly at a relatively low temperature in the range of 180°. Once again, a gentle process but as of yet there are no home kitchen vacuum cookers. The oven method works very well.

Tomatoes roasting in the oven.

We pressure can because, well, we have one, and it is fast and easy. You can also process in a hot bath per standard instructions because these traditional tomatoes are acidic enough. Many people freeze the sauce instead of using a canner. Although we put up over 100 pints of tomato sauce at varying degrees of thickness, we never add anything but salt. We prefer to add seasonings later. Caution applies especially to ingredients that lower the acidity (increase the pH) like peppers. The acidic nature of tomatoes makes them safe and easy to can. Best not to mess with that comfortable margin of safety.

Because Astiana is our own variety and not a precious heirloom or such, we can sell them at $35/20 pounds without shame, and you get the stylish Ayers Creek Farm lug in the bargain. We will have some tomatoes prepackaged and, with a measure of trepidation, accept requests to hold 20# lugs as supply permits. Please email us before 4 pm on Saturday, and we will try to fill requests for 20# lugs only. And don't fret if this isn't the week for you, we will have them for the next few weeks.

Need A Quick Dinner? Pasta Arrabiata Fills the Bill

Pasta seems to be the first thing I think of when we need a quick and hearty dinner, whether it's bacon carbonara or sausage and garlic or a quick toss with a sauté of whatever's lingering in the vegetable bin. After all, boiling a pot of water takes no time at all, and a sauce can be made in the time it takes the pasta to cook.

A few weeks ago I got a big bag of dried Aci Sivri peppers (left) from Ayers Creek Farm at the Hillsdale Farmers' Market. It's a cayenne-like, long red pepper that originated in Turkey that gives a moderate kick when ground fresh. I'd been wanting to make an arrabiata sauce with them and some of the tomatoes I'd roasted and stashed in the freezer last summer, so one night when we needed something fast—okay, okay, I'd been sucked into the vortex of the internet and looked up to see it was frighteningly close to dinnertime—I decided it was the perfect time to give it a whirl.

Pasta Arrabiata

As mentioned above, I used the fabulous tomatoes I'd roasted and frozen the summer before, but while this recipe would work with any canned tomatoes, since there are so few ingredients, the tomatoes play a key role in the flavor of the final dish and it'd be worth using the best quality you can get. The amount of pepper will vary depending on the type of pepper used. Start with a little and add it to the sauce gradually until it suits you.

1 lb. dried pasta
2 Tbsp. olive oil
3 c. roasted, puréed tomatoes
2 Tbsp. minced garlic
1 tsp. freshly ground dried hot red pepper (or to taste)
Freshly grated parmesan

Bring a large pot of water to boil. While the water heats, place the oil in a medium skillet over moderate heat until it shimmers. Add the garlic and sauté briefly to warm it (watch that it doesn't brown), then add the tomatoes and red pepper. Bring to a simmer.

When the pot of water boils, cook the pasta till al dente, then drain and place in a serving bowl. Add the sauce and toss. Sprinkle with parmesan and serve with more parmesan in a small bowl on the table.

Towering Temple of Tomatoes

I can hear my mother's words echoing in my head: "This is because your eyes were bigger than your stomach."

It all started innocently enough, when Dave and I drove out to Ayers Creek Farm to pick some of the Astiana tomatoes that, for the last few years, we've roasted and frozen to use throughout the winter in soups, sauces and, yes, even cocktails. The first year we bought a total of 50 pounds of the blood-red, heart-shaped tomatoes that Anthony and Carol brought from Italy as seed and adapted to the climate of the Wapato Valley. (Read the very entertaining story of their discovery of these tomatoes.) The next year it was 80 pounds, then 120 pounds, and this year I figured we needed 150 pounds to take us all the way to the next season.

Roughly chopped, ready for roasting.

Named Astiana after the town in the Piedmont region of Italy where they originated, these large tomatoes are almost all flesh with very few seeds, ideal for making sauce and paste. My plan was to get a jump start on the processing by bringing home 50 pounds or so, then getting two more batches of 50 pounds each as the season, about a month long, progressed. I say "was" because when we got to the field and started picking, using the four yellow crates that Carol insisted we would need—you can tell I'm trying to shuffle off blame here, right?—well, that's when my clever plan went a bit sideways. By which I mean completely off the rails.

After roasting, ready to bag and freeze.

Hauling the crates back to the processing shed, we knew we had more than 50 pounds-worth staring back at us, but when it was all weighed and bagged, that's when I heard my mother's voice. It turns out there were 142 pounds of my favorite fruit sitting on the table in that shed, 142 pounds that were subsequently driven home and the same 142 pounds carried into the house.

Roasting on the grill.

To say I saw my life, or at least the next few days of my life, flash before my eyes might be a wee bit of an overstatement, but there was definitely an "Oh my god what have I gotten myself into" feeling at surveying the bags and bags (and bags…) of ripening tomatoes at my feet. Fortunately they were at varying stages, from squishy, do-something-with-them-right-now-or-say-sayonara ripeness to barely pink-almost-green ones that, with luck, would take three or four days to get fully ripe.

Sorting through them and labeling bags "soon" for those needing attention in the next day or two and "hold" for those that could wait a couple of days, we dove in and grilled two batches of the softest ones that evening, which went immediately into the freezer. We hope to have the rest done by Sunday, divided more or less evenly between grilled and oven-roasted. Wish us luck!

Method to My Madness

I go a little crazy this time of year. I feel the chill in the air, hear the leaves crunching underfoot and piling a little deeper every day, and it makes me feel like grabbing what little is left of summer and saving it for the cold, damp days to come. Especially when I hear that Anthony and Carol at Ayers Creek Farm are starting to bring in their astiana tomatoes.

For the last three years I've roasted and grilled dozens of pounds of them, let them cool, then bagged them in zip-lock freezer bags and tossed them in the freezer. The roasting concentrates their already deep flavor, and using them in a pasta sauce or for braising a pot roast is like adding the taste of a late summer day to whatever I'm cooking.

The method is simple, the time spent well worth it. And if you make enough, it'll make summer last till next summer comes around again.

Roasted Tomatoes

Preheat oven to 400°. Chop tomatoes into large chunks, about 2" across. Place in shallow roasting pan and place the pan on a rack in the middle of the oven. Roast for one hour or until tomatoes are tender and some are starting to brown on the edges.

Scoop from pan into large mixing bowl and allow to cool. Remove skins if you want (they should just slip off), then ladle into quart freezer bags. Freeze and use all winter!

For grilling method, see Tomatoes Galore.

Putting Food By: Tomato Paste

I was totally bummed when my friend Hank Shaw, author of DIY (and by that I mean forage, kill, scavenge-it-yourself) guide Hunt, Gather, Cook, mentioned that every year he makes tomato paste in his driveway. You see, he lives in Sacramento where it gets around a million degrees in the summer. He can put a tray of puréed tomatoes on the hood of his truck and in a couple of days it has evaporated into paste.

Try that here and you'd have a tray-full of moldy moosh.

The raw goods, straight out of the field.

Somehow it had never occurred to me to try another method, that is until I was out at Ayers Creek Farm and Anthony Boutard was putting a bowl of puréed Astianas into their wood-fired oven. Call it a lightbulb moment, OMG, St. Paul-flattened-in-the-road, whatever. Here I've been making gallons of roasted tomatoes to pull out this winter and have never once considered sticking some in the oven for a few hours to make paste.

Knock me over with a feather. Or, as Anthony's wife Carol says, "Shoot me in the foot."

Roasting.

Fortunately I'd just gleaned a box of tomatoes from their field, and I couldn't get home fast enough to roast 'em up (400° oven for 45 min.-1 hr.), purée them with an immersion blender—I'll use a food mill next time to make a completely smooth texture—and stick them in a 200° oven.

About halfway there.

With my 2 3/4 qt. Le Creuset preheated in the oven as it came up to temp and then filled to the rim, it took about 24 hours for it to reduce by half (top photo). It needed stirring every few hours, and I probably could have reduced it further, but the paste was rich and smooth and would suffice for my purposes. I ladled it in 8 to 10-ounce quantities into zip-lock freezer bags, packed them two-to-a-bag in quart bags and stuck them in the freezer. Done.

And I'm sure my embarrassment about not thinking of this before will abate the first time I thaw it out, spread it on bruschetta and top it with chevre or tapenade, don't you think?

The Ant or the Grasshopper?

Excuses? I got a million of 'em.

First the grasshopper part: I've been out of town a lot this summer, to Wenatchee and Lake Chelan (pre-fire), then to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and most recently to Louisville, Kentucky, to explore the city and visit Maker's Mark.

Now for the ant: the garden was on (virtual) steroids this summer, producing pounds and pounds of tomatoes, requiring us to eat them fresh, give them away or roast and freeze. Then I got the chance to help my friend Linda home-can about 50 pounds of fresh albacore, which I'll be telling you about soon.

Last, but most certainly not least, last winter I got addicted to homemade tomato sauce made from astiana tomatoes I roasted and froze. Pulling out a bag guaranteed a blast of summer flavor on grey, rainy winter days. Which meant I had little choice but to do the same when they appeared at the Ayers Creek stand at the Hillsdale market this year. Seventy or so pounds of tomatoes later, I have about eighteen quarts of delicious roasted tomatoes just waiting to be used in sauces, stews and soups.

Which, seeing as I'm going to be around for the foreseeable future, you'll be able to read about right here. Cause I've run out of excuses.

Tomatoes Galore

That title sounds like the name of a burlesque star, doesn't it?

"And tonight the delicious Tomatoes Galore will tickle your fancy with her juicy rendition of 'On Top of Old Smoky'…"

It began raining tomatoes on Sunday when Carol Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm dropped off seventy-five pounds of tomatoes, the last of the awesome Astianas that made such crazy sauce last year. With my brother taking twenty pounds, that still left between fifty and sixty pounds to deal with. So I decided to dedicate a day to their roasting, firing up both the oven and the grill in order to get through all of them in a timely fashion.

Unlike last year, I'm not doing anything but cutting the tomatoes in quarters, laying them skin-side down in pans (or on foil on the grill) and letting 'er rip till they've started to burn a bit on the bottom. Then it's scraping them off into a bowl to cool, pulling any charred skins off and ladling them into freezer bags.

The tomatoes cook down a surprising amount, with about four to five pounds of tomatoes making around a quart of sauce. And no doubt some mighty fine eating this winter. Wish me luck!

* * *

UPDATE: Twelve quarts of luscious sauce are now resting comfortably in the freezer waiting to make some kick-ass dinners this winter. Stay tuned!

Saucy Lady

Talk about gift horses.

When Carol Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm called to ask if I would like a few of the very last of their end-of-season Asti paste tomatoes, I said, "Well, yeah!" After all, the last batch, which I roasted on the Weber, produced a smoky, rich, brick-red sauce that is sitting, bagged and waiting, in the freezer for the time when Dave gets a yen to make pizza on the grill.

Walker, checking out the goods.

Little did I suspect that by "just a few" she meant a big heavy duty cardboard box containing, oh, about  30 pounds-worth delivered by the angel herself on her way to drop off a little produce with one Mr. Greg Higgins. So with the box sitting on my counter and fruit flies buzzing greedily around, I fired up the oven, got out my two largest roasting pans and got to work.

Grinder-iffic!

For those of you who know that I adore my tomatoes smoked on the Weber (charcoal, of course), the reason I chose the oven method was two-fold: first, I have lots of the smoky goodness already (see above), and second, I wanted to be able to leave them roasting away without worrying about adding coals or turning the grill. And 30 pounds at four pounds a batch and two hours each was more math than I wanted to do.

Concentrating.

So, unlike my last oven-roasting session, I simply chopped the tomatoes into big hunks, set them skin-side down in the roasting pans and slid them into a 300° oven until they started caramelizing, which took about two to two-and-a-half hours. No onions, no garlic, no oil, just tomatoes. Then I scooped them out into a bowl, let them cool a bit and pulled the skins off by hand (a sieve or food mill would be another option if you don't want skins or seeds).

Mind you, it took all day and four of those double-roasting pan batches to do them all, but do them all I did. Then Dave got out the KitchenAid mixer with its handy-dandy grinder and produced a fine grind that is, even as I write, simmering away on the stove to reduce to a fine sauce, soon to join its brothers-in-bags in the deep freeze. Can't wait!

Saving It For Later, Revisited

Remember what I said earlier this month about roasting tomatoes to make into sauce, save it for later, blah blah blah? Forget it. Erase it from your memory.

Because I've found the epitome, the apex, the best-and-highest use of in-season tomatoes ever. Something so good you'll go to the nearest farmers' market and buy buckets of them just to know it'll be sitting in your freezer waiting for you to pull it out the next time you need sauce or, as my neighbor Susana did recently, you want to make a killer roasted tomato soup.

Once again, my brother provided the inspiration when he posted that he was sitting at his wine shop working while tomatoes roasted on the grill outside. Of course, I had to try it for myself and see if it was better than my own oven-roasted (no, really, forget I said that) version. And dang if he wasn't right again. It was even simpler. And, believe me, ten times more flavorful.

Remember that, when you find yourself standing at your favorite farmers' table and begging for his tomatoes, I warned you.

Roasted Grilled Tomato Sauce

Take several pounds of tomatoes (I can easily do at least 4 lbs. at once on our 22" Weber) and slice larger ones in quarters, smaller ones in half.

Build a fire or light charcoal. You can also soak hickory or mesquite, as well as rosemary branches, if you want, for the extra flavor. While the coals are heating up, top the grilling rack with heavy-duty aluminum foil, crimping the edge to leave a 1" gap all around. Poke a few holes in it with a grilling fork to allow more smoke to penetrate.

When coals are white hot, spread in single layer. Top with soaked wood and rosemary branches, if desired. Place tomatoes skin-side down on the aluminum foil-covered rack, drizzle with olive oil and salt. Place over coals, cover and cook for 3-4 hours, checking occasionally to make sure coals haven't burned out. Add more charcoal as necessary.

Remove tomatoes by spooning them off into a large mixing bowl. Most of the skins will be left on the foil, but don't worry about scraping some blackened skins into the bowl. Allow to cool slightly and purée in food processor in batches. Cool completely, then scoop into quart freezer bags and freeze.

Saving It For Later

There's a certain anxiety that lurks in the background of even the most joyous activities. Think of births, weddings, gardening.

Gardening, you ask?

Think about it. Picking out the right seeds and starts for your climate and soil. Planting so they'll get just the right amount of sun. Then there's the constant monitoring. Too much water? Not enough? How is my garden doing compared to my neighbors'? It's almost enough to require treatment for GOCD (gardener's obsessive compulsive disorder).

When my tomatoes first set fruit, there was a lot of the dreaded bottom-end rot, no doubt due, in my case, to too much watering. So I cut back and the rest of the fruit seems fine…another bullet dodged. But now I find myself wandering out on a daily basis and squeezing the red fruit to see if it's really ripe enough to pick; with the Green Zebras, if they're developing just the barest hint of yellow behind their green facades. It's exhausting!

And now that we're in the full-on firehose of tomato season, I'm starting to worry about not letting any go to waste. Fortunately, we have a freezer sitting in the garage just waiting to be filled up with summer's goodness, though it's already looking after bags of rhubarb and the various berries I managed to squirrel away.

I'll be adding quart bags of roasted tomato sauce now that temperatures have dropped to levels reasonable enough to turn the oven on during the day. And any anxiety I might have about those long dark days of winter will be at least partially relieved.

Roasted Tomato Sauce

5-6 lbs. tomatoes, quartered if large, halved if small
2-3 large yellow onions, cut in sixths
1 Tbsp. dried oregano
1 1/2 Tbsp. dried basil
1/3 c. olive oil
Salt to taste

Spread out tomatoes and onions, skin side down, on two roasting pans. Sprinkle with the oregano and basil, then drizzle with the olive oil, half on each pan. Roast in 400° oven for 45 min.-1 hr. until tomatoes have partially collapsed and onions are beginning to brown on edges.

Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly Pinch off tomato skins (they should just slide off) and purée in batches in a food processor. In large pot or Dutch oven, simmer on stove top until reduced to desired thickness. Cool and put in quart freezer bags.