| ||
Home | (Archives + Search) | Contact | Subscribe (it's free) | About Us | Wine Agents | Wine Reviews | Good Food Revolution | ||
Green is Good
The place was jam-packed full of railroad mean at lunchtime so Grady Kilgore went to the kitchen door and hollered in, "Fix me a mess of them fried green tomatoes and some ice tea, will ya, Sipsey? I’m in a hurry." Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe – Fannie Flagg Almost every photograph from my childhood taken during the summer and early fall has an unripe tomato in it. My parents always had unripe tomatoes on every windowsill. My brother, sister and I play “spot the tomato” when looking through old pictures. Oddly, with all those green tomatoes around we never had them fried. Mom would put them up as chow chow, basically a green tomato relish that we all hated so most jars were given away to friends and neighbours. It wasn’t until reading Fannie Flagg’s immortal book that I had even heard of fried green tomatoes, a specialty of the Deep South. Some brilliant Southerner concocted the recipe to use up the green tomatoes in the garden before the frost got to them. After seeing Sipsey fry up a batch at the Whistle Stop Café in the movie I tried them at home. They were amazing and I’ve been making them ever since. The thing with red tomatoes is that they taste like shit almost all year round. They come into season for a bit, get gobbled up and they’re gone leaving us with nothing but a bunch of unoriginal ‘foodies’ lamenting the end of the season for another year. When you can find an unripe tomato it always tastes good. If you have any tomato plants in your garden, go and smell the leaves in the hot sun, that’s what a green tomato tastes like. I buy red tomatoes throughout the year but usually serve them cooked. I cut them into wedges and throw them in a smoking pan to char with a hit of balsamic vinegar. They are delicious with scrambled eggs or accompanying a steak. Whenever I see a green tomato, usually scattered through the piles of cheap field tomatoes, I buy it. They aren’t always available so when I get my hands on one it’s a treat. In writing this I asked some chefs I know, Leslie Vineberg at Perigee and Mark Cutrara at Cowbell) to use green tomatoes in a special at their restaurants so I could see some different takes on the tried and true classic preparation. They couldn’t find a single green tomato. Well, Mark got some beautiful Green Zebras from Cookstown Greens but they’re an heirloom variety that stay green when ripe, and ripe tomatoes just won’t do. Fried Green Tomatoes is the simplest recipe to make. Dip them in egg beaten with milk (the Original Whistle Stop Café Cookbook recipe uses buttermilk), then dredge in seasoned breadcrumbs mixed with flour (some recipes call for cornstarch but I find it too gritty) and lay them in a hot pan greased liberally with bacon fat. Let them sizzle until golden brown on both sides and serve. Through the years my fried green tomatoes have come from No Frills and the corner produce market. The other day though, Kerry and I were driving through Picton and found some huge green tomatoes at a roadside farm stand. I fried them up for breakfast the next day and served them with some farm fresh eggs, thick cut bacon and toasted walnut bread from Thuet’s. It was the best breakfast ever, so good in fact that we went back to bed immediately after. Caterer Jake Tyson grills the tomatoes and puts them in salsa. “Typically you would use lots of lime juice in salsa, but when you use grilled green tomatoes they bring their own acidity so cut back on the lime. There’s something about green tomatoes, they just taste so fresh.” The most popular, and most heinous, unripe produce is the green pepper. A green pepper is a barely edible piece of garbage and should be banned from the supermarket shelves. A green tomato, on the other hand, is a wonderful ingredient that has been ignored, as Al said. It’s an ingredient that deserves to have it’s day, but until then stay on the lookout for them whenever you shop. I’m not dissing local, I love local. But come February when everyone else is gagging on local rutabagas we can be thankful for the little taste of sunshine shipped here from Chile. Read All of Ivy's Gremolata articles here. | ||
