September is a top month for tomatoes. A selection of the possibilities fordishes that you can make with it: eat them raw as a salad, go crazy andferment them or cook a winter stock of soup and pasta sauce. These are thetomato recipes that culinary journalist Janneke Vreugdenhil heartilyrecommends.
Starters with tomato
1. Perfect for late summer: tomato soup with figs and lots of cumin
An old-fashioned recipe. This tomato soup is inspired by a soup that Janneketasted at restaurant Moro in London in 2013 – the restaurant still exists andJanneke still recommends this soup as a late summer favourite. Sweet yetsavory at the same time, it has a deep, earthy taste thanks to a generous doseof cumin that you rarely taste in tomato soup. Tip: When buying dried figs,make sure they look fresh. If they are covered in sugar crystals, they areold, tough and not tasty.
In the recipe you will find the ideal ratio of cumin, tomato and fig: End-of-summer soup
2. Shopska salata, a tomato salad from Skopje
In 2019 Janneke traveled after the main character from (and author of) GrandHotel Europa, Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer. It brought her to Skopje, the capital ofNorth Macedonia. The menus were full of local dishes, each sounding evenbetter than the next. She found one dish on every menu: shopska salata, asalad of cucumber, tomatoes, onions and white cheese. Since there is littlechance that you will find Macedonian white cheese at the supermarket aroundthe corner, any other white cheese will do as well.
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Shopska salata, salad of cucumber, tomatoes, onions and white cheese. In therecipe, Janneke explains which white cheeses you can use: A salad fromSkopje.
3. Janneke’s favorite tomato salad with marinated onion
According to interest group GroentenFruit Huis, tomatoes have been the mosteaten vegetable in the Netherlands for years. Onion comes second. Janneke putthem together in an extremely simple, but now favorite recipe. The trick isbuying the tastiest tomatoes, and soaking the onions in the red wine vinegarso that they lose their pungency but retain their crunch.
The recipe says what the magic ratio is: On to 800 grams of vegetables perday!
4. Tourin à la tomato
As far as Janneke is concerned, it is the ultimate tomato soup: tourin à latomate. A tomato soup from the southwest of France, which gets a velvetysoftness due to the addition of goose fat. By the way, if you don’t havepiment d’espelette at home, you can of course also use a different dried chilipepper.
But not too much, because, as mentioned, the main role for the tomato is: It’s tomato season, that’s why: tourin à la tomate.
Main dishes with tomato
4. The simplest, most ingenious tomato sauce
Sometimes it doesn’t take much for something delicious. Not so for this tomatosauce. Marcella Hazan, celebrated cookery writer in the last century, came upwith the recipe and Janneke brought it to the attention again in 2013. _NRC_when Hazan died. And because according to Janneke it is still one of the mostingenious tomato sauces ever, here again in the repeat. All you need aretomatoes, stewed with butter and onion.
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Bonus tip: make a big stock and freeze it in portions. This way you alwayshave a delicious sauce in stock with tomatoes from the season: The simplestand most genius tomato sauce
5. Pasta with cherry tomatoes and nutmeg and how to cut tomatoes like aninja
Who does not honor the small. Cherry tomatoes are small, but stronger andsweeter tasting tomatoes than regular ones and you can go anywhere with them.The only crime is the lot of carving involved – you have to cut a lot morebefore you can really do anything with it.
Janneke wrote down in this recipe from 2014 how you can do that moreconveniently, and what delicious pasta you can make with cherry tomatoes:Hit on YouTube: ninja cherry tomato trick
What else can you make with tomatoes
6. Ukrainian fermented tomatoes
A few years ago, Janneke did an experiment: she loved the taste of pickledtomatoes and their effervescent juice and wanted to learn how to fermenttomatoes herself. After several failed attempts, the last one went well. Thetomato pieces are fine, finely chopped, great as a salsa with, for example, apiece of grilled white fish, or on a bruschetta.
How Janneke finally got the job done, she wrote down in this recipe: Theredeeming tip for fermented tomatoes
7. Break your breakfast routine with this avocado toast with tomatoes,coffee and chocolate
It may sound bizarre, but Janneke is convinced. In 2019 she read in aninterview with the Italian-British chef Giorgio Locatelli about his favoritebreakfast: a piece of avocado topped with fried tomatillo, a fried egg andgrated raw cocoa beans.
Janneke didn’t necessarily have the right ingredients, but made a variation onthem and encourages everyone to give them a try: Brilliant at breakfast withthis toast
8. Save the summer, make chutney from tree or regular tomatoes
Tamarillos are also known as tree tomatoes. The oval fruits have a smooth,yellow-orange to dark red skin, which is very bitter and unpleasant to eat.The golden yellow flesh, on the other hand, is slightly sweet and veryaromatic, and is perfect for making a chutney. This way, you can still benefitfrom the good taste of September tomatoes long after the tomato season.