The eight tastiest recipes with tomatoes

September is a top month for tomatoes. A selection of the possibilities for dishes that you can make with it: eat them raw as a salad, go crazy and ferment them or cook a winter stock of soup and pasta sauce. These are the tomato recipes that culinary journalist Janneke Vreugdenhil heartily recommends.

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 Janneke tasted at restaurant Moro in London in 2013 – the restaurant still exists and Janneke still recommends this soup as a late summer favourite. Sweet yet savory at the same time, it has a deep, earthy taste thanks to a generous dose of 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 are old, 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) Grand Hotel Europa, Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer. It brought her to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia. The menus were full of local dishes, each sounding even better than the next. She found one dish on every menu: shopska salata, a salad of cucumber, tomatoes, onions and white cheese. Since there is little chance that you will find Macedonian white cheese at the supermarket around the corner, any other white cheese will do as well.

Shopska salata, salad of cucumber, tomatoes, onions and white cheese. In the recipe, Janneke explains which white cheeses you can use: A salad from Skopje.

3. Janneke’s favorite tomato salad with marinated onion

According to interest group GroentenFruit Huis, tomatoes have been the most eaten vegetable in the Netherlands for years. Onion comes second. Janneke put them together in an extremely simple, but now favorite recipe. The trick is buying the tastiest tomatoes, and soaking the onions in the red wine vinegar so that they lose their pungency but retain their crunch.

The recipe says what the magic ratio is: On to 800 grams of vegetables per day!

4. Tourin à la tomato

As far as Janneke is concerned, it is the ultimate tomato soup: tourin à la tomate. A tomato soup from the southwest of France, which gets a velvety softness due to the addition of goose fat. By the way, if you don’t have piment d’espelette at home, you can of course also use a different dried chili pepper.

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 tomato sauce. Marcella Hazan, celebrated cookery writer in the last century, came up with 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 most ingenious tomato sauces ever, here again in the repeat. All you need are tomatoes, stewed with butter and onion.

Bonus tip: make a big stock and freeze it in portions. This way you always have a delicious sauce in stock with tomatoes from the season: The simplest and most genius tomato sauce

5. Pasta with cherry tomatoes and nutmeg and how to cut tomatoes like a ninja

Who does not honor the small. Cherry tomatoes are small, but stronger and sweeter 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 more before you can really do anything with it.

Janneke wrote down in this recipe from 2014 how you can do that more conveniently, 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 pickled tomatoes and their effervescent juice and wanted to learn how to ferment tomatoes herself. After several failed attempts, the last one went well. The tomato pieces are fine, finely chopped, great as a salsa with, for example, a piece of grilled white fish, or on a bruschetta.

How Janneke finally got the job done, she wrote down in this recipe: The redeeming 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 an interview with the Italian-British chef Giorgio Locatelli about his favorite breakfast: a piece of avocado topped with fried tomatillo, a fried egg and grated raw cocoa beans.

Janneke didn’t necessarily have the right ingredients, but made a variation on them and encourages everyone to give them a try: Brilliant at breakfast with this 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 very aromatic, and is perfect for making a chutney. This way, you can still benefit from the good taste of September tomatoes long after the tomato season.

For those who can’t find tamarillos, the chutney also tastes good with regular tomatoes: There are so many delicious chutneys

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