Fried Green Cherry Tomatoes
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Summer may be over, but my tomato bushes sure are still abundant with green Husky Cherry Tomatoes. My Cheffy, Jen Carroll, challenged me to create a plant-based dish for the Plant Your Vote Challenge just as I was planning to leave for a long visit to my papa bear in Maryland, and so why not think of a great use for all of these end-of-the-season unripened tomatoes?!
If you don’t know about Plant Your Vote yet, this super cool initiative, led by power Chefs Carla Hall and Spike Mendelsohn, is meant to encourage food lovers of all stripes to create plant-based recipes with the collective goal of increasing voter participation in a fun and delicious way! Cook your favorite veggies from the farmers market or grocery store, share recipes using herbs or veggies that you are growing at home all in the spirit of inspiring others to adopt a healthier, more plant-based lifestyle.
It’s probably been at least a good 11 years since I’ve tasted a fried green tomato, and, honestly, the memory is so distant that it turns out that this recipe became more about capturing a feeling and creating a delicious veggie bite than an actual recipe. It was a gray cloudy day in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was visiting my best friend’s older sister. Ravenous, we ventured out to a local restaurant for some simple yummy Southern cooking. Nothing fancy. Being from the Northeast where we relish the warm sun-kissed red tomatoes in the height of the season, I remember feeling so perplexed reading the words “fried green tomatoes” casually written on the menu. I had never tasted a green tomato before. But why not give it a try? It’s no secret that most things that taste good taste even better when coated in batter and deep-fried.
No apologies, but I did not measure what I was doing for these lil nuggets. This is more of a technique of how to dredge|batter|fry, which in the long run aims to empower you with a fundamental method instead of just giving you number for number what to do.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. — Rumi
I chose not to slice these since cherry tomatoes are already so tiny, and I was craving popper-like snackers. A light dusting in starch, a dip in an egg-buttermilk bath, and a good ole roll in some seasoned breadcrumbs and cornmeal turns slightly tart tomatoes into little nuggets of crispy crackling gold.
RECIPE NOTES:
Choose green, firm tomatoes for the best results.
Just like all ripe tomatoes, all green tomatoes won’t have the same flavor, as each variety has its own nuances. Choose a variety of tomato that you like to eat.
As this is a method and less of an exact recipe, if you have more tomatoes, just make more of each mix! Easy peasy.
Being in Maryland, I decided to season my breadcrumb cornmeal mixture with Old Bay. Duh. Feel free to season with any spices, pepper, etc. that you desire.
I also used gluten free breadcrumbs to make these edible for me. Make them using regular breadcrumbs if you don’t need to eat gluten free.
Use one hand for grabbing the tomatoes and dipping into the dry ingredients and the other hand for dipping tomatoes into the egg buttermilk mixture in order to keep my hands semi-clean and make less of a mess.
Your tomatoes may not look perfectly round after dredging and dipping. That’s ok! Just roll them each one around in your hands after you’ve finished dipping to create a more perfectly round look.
Carefully slide the tomatoes into to the hot oil to prevent any splatters or boil-overs.
The tomatoes are best when freshly made and fried, but they’re still pretty good when reheated (or eaten on a sandwich).
While I didn’t specify an amount of oil for frying, you want to make sure you have enough oil in your pot to cover the tomatoes when frying. Anything less will be inefficient for frying the tomatoes.
Allow the oil to cool completely, strain and you can reuse the rest once or twice more, storing in a cool, dark spot.
As I was limited in ingredients and didn’t want to make a trip to the store, I made a basic pantry-friendly version of the comeback sauce for a dip. Creamy, spicy, slightly sweet, and perfect for dipping basically anything fried into, traditional comeback sauce is a Southern standby akin to a quick “poor man’s remoulade”. These certainly don’t need a dipping sauce, but feel free to make a true remoulade or any other sauce you want, if desired.
ENJOY!!!
EQUIPMENT:
