Comments on: Hot Tomatoes

By: bennym

bennym — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:12:16 +0000

jjjjjjjj, to counter acidity, in addition to adding salt and a bit of sugar, I stir in a very tiny pinch of baking soda (alkaline) to my tomato sauce. It will foam up. Add more as needed, but a little goes a long way, so keep tasting your sauce along the way.

By: jjjjjjjj

jjjjjjjj — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 09:36:08 +0000

Good stuff. Thanks for the link MM!

By: MP

MP — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 16:27:25 +0000

Those heirloom tomatoes look spectacular! The cherry ones, too! I love sour tomatoes so I would probably have eaten them like I would sour mangoes, with lots of spicy bagoong!

By: Betchay

Betchay — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 15:13:25 +0000

Nacho, those are terrific heirlooms!
And Kass, same dreams here! :)

By: Marketman

Marketman — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 07:09:37 +0000

jjjjjjj, you might try very ripe local tomatoes, and add salt and a touch of sugar to counter the acidity. I have made fresh tomato sauces from locally grown tomatoes and they were quite edible... but that's just chopped up nice tomatoes just warmed in olive oil, hot pasta, chunks of buffalo mozzarella and torn up basil. But most of the time, I used canned Italian tomatoes, they are superior to most local options I am afraid to say... See THIS POST.

By: jjjjjjjj

jjjjjjjj — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 06:47:05 +0000

Marketman, do you have a recipe for pasta sauce using our native tomatoes? Given the quality of the usual tomatoes that we find in the Philippines, it is very difficult to make a decent pasta sauce out of fresh tomatoes. The sauce turns out very acidic. No choice but to settle for canned tomatoes. Is there a trick to tone down or counter the acid?

By: Footloose

Footloose — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 17:16:51 +0000

Oh, let’s forgive an easy to make mistake like that, particularly coming from a chef. Now a horticulturist making the same misclassification may be a little harder to overlook. It seems easier to cavil only with tomatoes because of their common colour when ripe; with eggplant, okra, squashes and gourds, not quite so. This is probably why we modify vegetables with green leafy when we refer to non-fruit ones.

By: erehwon

erehwon — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:51:53 +0000

From Oxford Dictionaries online:
“As far as cooking is concerned, some things which are strictly fruits, such as tomatoes or bean pods, may be called ‘vegetables’ because they are used in savoury rather than sweet cooking. The term ‘vegetable’ is more generally used of other edible parts of plants, such as cabbage leaves, celery stalks, and potato tubers, which are not strictly the fruit of the plant from which they come. Occasionally the term ‘fruit’ may be used to refer to a part of a plant which is not a fruit, but which is used in sweet cooking: rhubarb, for example.
So, the answer to the question is that a tomato is technically the fruit of the tomato plant, but it’s used as a vegetable in cooking.”
https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/is-a-tomato-a-fruit-or-a-vegetable

By: Marketman

Marketman — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 01:23:46 +0000

jjjjj, terroir and temperature I think goes a long way to explain things. Though I have to say, many of the tomatoes above were not sour, and were terrific by local standards, but not quite on par with the fabulous ones in more temperate regions.

By: jjjjjjjj

jjjjjjjj — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 01:20:14 +0000

i wonder why tomatoes in the philippines always taste sour unlike those in europe which taste sweet