Tomato Hacks That Will Level Up Your Cooking Game

This is more than a tomato.

It's a Swiss army knife.

[upbeat music]

It's got a bunch of different tools.

It's got water, sugar, acids, umami, color, jammy carbs,

fibrous carbs, and of course, aroma.

Today, let's take a look at what a tomato can do for you.

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So every technique that we're looking at today works

for any kind of tomato,

but there are a couple of techniques

that I turn to specifically

when I have kind of crappy tomatoes.

Step one, char 'em.

Take them,

put them into a rippin' hot cast iron pan,

and let 'em get blistered and charred.

What's going on is you have a little bit

of evaporation of moisture.

You're basically concentrating a little bit

of the tomato-y goodness that they have locked inside.

You're also using some of those sugars

and amino acids to kickstart browning.

You're gonna get little charred

and blackened spots that will start

to create a little bit more depth of flavor, earthiness,

nuttiness, things that are lowkey in the background

of a really good, peak season, ripe tomato.

So you could stop right around here,

and already you've got like the perfect antipasti tomato.

Like, a little bit of salt, some olive oil,

put that in a bowl, and have people spoon it out.

Or if you want something

that can be a little bit more mushy,

you can leave them in the pan,

and what I like to do is actually season them with salt.

What will happen is you'll get this really melty,

very unique, concentrated tomato experience

that you wouldn't otherwise,

especially in the dead of winter

in a place where tomatoes are not currently in season.

You can also take baby tomatoes

and you can do pickled whole tomatoes.

They basically become almost like olives.

You can take really any tomato you want

and mix it with some vinegar and wine,

and make your own tomato vinegar.

Another great medium is oil.

Throw some tomatoes in a pot of oil.

Throw it on the back of a stove

on the lowest possible heat for an hour.

What you will get at the end of that hour

is confit tomatoes,

which are melting and delicious and roasty and wonderful,

that you can use then as a flavored oil

for whatever else you wanna use.

Let's say that you really want sliced tomatoes

on a sandwich,

but you are cursed with this.

[audience groaning]

There is a Get Out of Jail Free card

that you can pull if you so desire.

This is the ketchup pickled tomato.

Start with four parts ketchup.

So the idea is we want sweetness, savoriness, umami, aroma.

We want all of those things built back

into this disgraceful mess.

One part soy sauce.

The key here is soy sauce, fish sauce, shiro dashi,

the most umami substance that you have in your kitchen,

straight in there,

and then one part vinegar.

Whisk it together,

and then leave them in solitary confinement

for like 30 minutes.

When you pull these out of that marinade

and put them onto a burger,

it is a revelation.

Another thing you can do is take advantage of the fact

that they're kind of flavor sponges.

All of those pectin-y jammy carbs that are helpful

for thickening and creating tomato jerky

are also really good at trapping scents, trapping aromas.

Tomatoes love smoke.

So you take a grill,

and you're basically gonna wanna make sure

that the tomatoes are away from the smoke source,

and able to capture all of the smoke slowly,

'cause the goal for that is not to char them,

but simply to perfume them.

Smoked tomato ketchup is one of my favorite condiments

to make at home.

Smoked tomato soup.

I really like making smoked tomato jam.

Yeah, smoke.

Turns out, it's good.

Next up, tomato water.

Tomato are like 95% water.

If you're getting a tomato from a grocery store in December,

it's like a million percent water.

If you zoomed in on a tomato with a microscope,

you'd see something that looked kind of like a honeycomb.

There's a bunch of cells with walls

that are holding them together,

and inside each of those cells is a bunch of water.

To get that water out,

there's a lot of different approaches,

and each approach gives you different tools to work with.

The simplest way that I like to get water out of a tomato

is to chop 'em coarsely, salt 'em,

and beat 'em up a little bit.

If you let chopped salted tomatoes sit

for like 15, 20 minutes,

you'll eventually get something like this.

Water everywhere.

The way you turn it into a usable tool is to strain it.

This is tomato water.

So tomato water is awesome.

It's sour.

It's sweet.

It's got a lot of umami.

It's really, really aromatic and smells like tomatoes,

and if you salted the tomatoes to get the water out,

it's also salty.

This is like your do-it-all base

for at least 15 things you could do with a tomato.

First thing you can do with this tomato water,

make salad dressing.

It works great as a substitute

for about half the vinegar in your vinegarette.

It also is great when you need

to thin out a really creamy ranch or Caesar dressing.

You can use it as a broth base.

Truly just like salt and tomato water

is itself instant broth.

You can then use this as the water

that you start extracting vegetables and bones

and anything that you want to build your own broth.

You can use it as a pickling liquid.

You can use it as a brining liquid.

You can use it for ceviche.

Key ingredient for any ceviche is some source of acid.

Citrus, vinegar,

those things can sometimes get overwhelming.

Tomato has a lot of acid in it,

but tomato water is a great source of a more mild acid.

So replace about half the citrus juice in your ceviche base

with tomato water,

and you'll get something

that feels a little bit more universal.

A poaching liquid for fish and eggs

and anything else you want.

If you poach something like eggs in tomato water,

now instead of just a heat transfer medium,

you get the opportunity to infuse umami,

sweetness, sourness, and aroma

into what otherwise would be a pretty plain base

of your dish.

It's also great as a marinade carrier.

This is a do-it-all liquid

for anything that you wanna start in the kitchen.

So let's use that superpower in an egg wash.

So one of the things I like to do is whisk an egg

with a little bit of tomato water.

What this gives us is it ramps up the browning power,

so we get things a little bit more brown.

Honestly, pretzels are great.

This helps make everything feel like a pretzel.

It also gives you more umami, which is amazing on anything,

and the acidity in a tomato helps

to cut through some of the starchy fattiness

of your average biscuit, or roast chicken,

or whatever you're brushing this on,

which keeps you coming back for more.

You can use this exactly like you would any other egg wash.

Apply liberally before going into the oven.

Using the magic of television,

we have some that are already baked.

It smells like roasted tomatoes,

and it tastes like more than just a regular biscuit.

That's great.

That's really good. Yeah.

You should try this. It looks great.

[Cameraperson] Yeah.

It's like a biscuit, but pretzel-y.

[Cameraperson] Oh, it is.

Right? It's like savory.

It's got that almost to the edge of too brown.

Yeah. Next up,

tomato beurre monte.

There's a bunch of different versions of this.

I'm gonna start with the simplest one.

We'll build from there.

Basically you take chopped butter, unsalted butter,

so you can have control of how much salt you wanna add,

and melt it in a pot.

It's time to replace that water with tomato water.

Not only is the tomato here giving you sweetness, umami,

really, really nice tomato aroma,

it's also bringing a little bit

of extra emulsifying power to the table than you would have

with just the butter or water alone.

You can keep this quite watery

if you wanna use it as a cooking medium.

We talked about poaching earlier.

Butter poaching in tomato beurre monte

is what it feels like to be drunk with power.

It's great.

So at this point, we've evaporated enough of the water out

that the emulsion has weakened

and is on the verge of breaking.

If you wanna use this,

let's say for like a pasta sauce

or for something to glaze a piece of roast chicken

that just came out of the oven,

take it off the heat,

and you can add some cold butter back into the mix.

You can basically just swirl that in.

This is also great if you wanna use it

for glazing vegetables.

It's great if you wanna use it for cooking seafood

or shellfish really slowly in a poaching liquid.

All right, the version of liquid tomatoes

that most people are familiar with is pureed tomatoes.

You can absolutely take quartered tomatoes,

put 'em in a food processor or a blender,

and give 'em a buzz.

[processor whirring]

There's all kinds of pectin and different kinds of fiber.

There's a lot of structure that's getting lost in here

that's making it thick and kind of pucky.

Tomato puree is good for stews and sauce bases,

and for making tomato fruit leather,

and things where a bunch of solids are helpful.

But there's a lot of applications

where that gritty, mealy, coarse texture

of tomato puree isn't actually what you want.

A nice middle ground is to use a cheese grater.

You take your tomato, and you grate it like it's Parmesan.

So after grating, we have really opened up the holes

in that honeycomb to let water out quickly.

If you salted this, it would accelerate it even more,

and in just a couple minutes,

you would get a lot of really nice, usable tomato water.

And the key is you haven't completely destroyed

all of the cells in the tomato,

so it doesn't become this homogenous puree.

You're still able to effectively separate out all the solids

from all the liquids,

which gives us more tools to work with.

Obviously, tomato does well in savory circumstances.

Let's talk about a couple of sweet applications.

So sweet/savory caramel,

but with tomato water as an enhancer.

Most caramel recipes tell you to start with sugar,

usually something like honey or corn syrup,

and then almost every caramel recipe will tell you

to start by diluting everything with water.

Water+.

What caramel does is it takes the sweetness of sugar,

and it seasons it with other stuff

that makes it more complex and interesting.

So instead of just sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet,

your brain gets to enjoy sweet, nutty, sour, bitter,

a little bit of cheesy, sometimes funky, fishy.

All of those aromas

and all of those tastes in small doses create something

that feels like a kaleidoscope,

instead of just looking out a plain window.

When you add tomato into the mix,

you're basically amplifying all of those notes

that I just said,

and also the fact that tomatoes have a lot of umami

and they're savory means that this is a caramel

that you could either cook and finish

and put on chocolate cake,

or it's something that you could season

with a little bit of extra salt

and go right back into Brussels sprouts

or brushing it on chicken drumsticks

when you're grilling 'em on the grill,

or brush 'em onto a duck breast

if you're trying to get it super glassy and crispy.

It's a little bit of a do it all.

Now is the perfect time to add soy sauce

or fish sauce,

whatever your favorite savory condiment is,

and then all of a sudden, this becomes barbecue sauce+.

When you have fully cooked meat, lacquer this on top.

You can make like tomato flan.

You can use it as a swirl-in for a cookie

or for an ice cream.

You could even make granola.

So not only is it a super flavorful caramel,

but it becomes weirdly even more versatile

when using tomato water instead of just regular water

as the base.

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One of my favorite beverages to make with tomato water

is a simple play on bitters and soda.

So typically you've got your bitters on ice,

a little bit of tomato water, and some soda.

[can hissing] [upbeat music]

Garnish with a lime and a pinch of salt, and hydrate.

This works great as a non-alcoholic cocktail.

This also works great as an excuse to drink vodka.

That's like really good.

I'm just gonna keep that with me.

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One of the most overlooked,

and honestly, maligned, useful tools

that you can get from a tomato is the skin.

There is so much of the aroma

and the color of a tomato locked up in the skin.

I kind of hate the boiling water blanch

and ice bath method of taking tomato skins off,

but it is one way to do it,

and it's a good way if you don't have a lot of equipment.

So let's show it right now.

Cut an X in the top of the tomato,

the side opposite the stem,

and then we're ready to go into boiling water,

and leave it in there for about one to two minutes.

The goal is to start to see the skin loosening away

from the rest of the body of the tomato.

These have been in for a few seconds.

The plant glue, the plant cement, is starting to loosen.

Put it in your ice bath.

The reason everybody in culinary school

is taught to go into an ice bath

is to try as much as possible

to keep the aroma, the taste,

the texture of everything deeper than the skin

as similar to raw as possible.

It doesn't work great,

but it is a good way to get the tomatoes

to be at a more friendly handling temperature.

So once cool enough to handle,

take the tomato out of the ice bath,

and you can simply peel away the skin.

This skin is gold.

It's full of the jammy carbs that plant cement, plant glue,

that we're referring to as pectin.

It also has a lot of fibers,

and those fibrous carbs are really good

at making things crispy.

If you wanna get the seeds and skin separate

from all the water and pulp,

the number one, most efficient, best way is a food mill.

If you use the smallest gauge,

you can just grind whole tomatoes in it,

and it will trap the seeds and skin up top,

and it'll allow all the water and the pulp to pass through.

And then inside the mill itself,

we have skin and seeds and all the innards,

but don't throw the pulp and water away.

This is basically your classic tomato puree

if you're looking to make sofrito.

You can also use this in a sorbet or an ice cream.

You can also turn this into your own tomato paste,

but enough about all that nonsense.

We're here to see some skin.

Tomato skins are great for dehydrating.

If you don't have a dehydrator, no worries.

You can do this in a home oven.

You can also do it

if you have like a tabletop convection oven.

And this is also one of the best applications

for an air fryer.

And what you get after they're dehydrated,

just for an hour or two,

is a tomato skin chip, which you can eat like a chip.

It's got a really lovely, delicate, crispy texture,

very similar to like nori

if you have like seaweed chips,

and you can put this on a sandwich.

I think every sandwich in the United States and beyond

is better with chips inside of it.

You can also grind them up,

and use them as a way to give some more structure

and dimension to like a fried chicken breadcrumb coating.

These are great in a salad.

These are also great if they're fully ground up

into a tomato powder,

which is what we're gonna look at next.

Basically, you're gonna start

with dehydrated tomatoes and a spice grinder.

Load 'em in, put the top on, and grind.

[grinder whirring]

So after a couple of whirls,

we're starting to get to a powder,

but you can see that there's still a couple of pieces

that are kind of floating.

So what I'll do is add a little pinch of salt.

A pinch of salt in that grinder

will help mash the tomato chips up even more,

so that they have a chance to hit the blades

of the grinder.

Tomato powder.

This is one of the most useful, versatile things

that you can have in your kitchen.

French fries are a perfect application for tomato powder.

Hot, crispy potato,

some tomato powder or tomato salt,

and then toss.

You have tomato-seasoned potatoes that won't go soggy.

Which makes this ideal for if you wanted

to make tomato pasta, or steak sauce,

or use them in place of bonito flakes in making dashi.

You can use tomato skins, tomato powder, and kelp,

and have a delicious, deeply satisfying,

rich umami broth base.

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Tomato skins and seeds aren't the only thing

that you can put into a dehydrator.

So early in the process,

like a one-hour dehydrated tomato slice,

I think is one of the perfect things to put on a sandwich.

The mid range, like a couple hours in the dehydrator,

this jammy tomato is very similar to like the jammy egg

that we all got obsessed with in the late aughts.

And this is great if you want to puree it for a situation

where you would otherwise use tomato puree,

but don't have the time

or the opportunity to allow water to evaporate.

Puree this up, and you go straight

into the jammy, creamy tomato zone

that you want with your aioli.

This is also like, in my opinion, the ideal starting place

for something like a tomato pie.

This can also be taken to the extreme

where if you take a bunch

of slightly thinner-sliced jammy tomatoes,

dress 'em with olive oil and salt,

it basically becomes a delicious tomato carpaccio.

This is also one of my favorite places

to start if you're gonna thicken a sauce with tomatoes,

which is why this is also a great thing

to incorporate into soups,

or if you wanna make a tomato cream.

That also works well on pizza

if you're an absolute decadent degenerate.

It also is a great thing to like fold into risotto,

and anything that's like creamy and brothy,

and needs a little body right at the end.

You can also take tomato skin

with a little bit of the meat left on it,

and dehydrate it long enough

that it becomes like a tomato jerky.

If you take this even further,

dehydrate it all the way,

you end up with like a tomato cracker,

rather than just a tomato chip.

I've said jammy enough to describe this tomato.

We should make some jam.

So to make tomato jam,

I honestly think that tomatoes are miraculous

because they can either go sweet or savory,

depending on what's around them.

In like a typical jam with strawberries,

you can incorporate some diced,

partially-dehydrated jammy tomatoes

to basically donate a lot more pectin into the mix,

and make the end result feel even richer, even stickier,

even jammier than it would otherwise.

So I like to start with diced fruit, strawberries,

about one to one,

and the dehydrated jammy tomato.

Some sugar to whatever your desired level is.

A little bit of lemon juice.

I typically use less lemon for this kind of application.

And then a little bit of tomato water.

The tomatoes, what they're bringing to the table

is depth, color, tanginess, savoriness,

and thickness from the pectin.

So these have been cooking for about 45 minutes.

Witness the thickness.

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I would recommend using every possible part of the tomato

'cause it all has something to offer, including the stems.

Stick 'em in a bottle of white distilled vinegar,

leave them in there for a couple weeks, strain it out,

and you'll get a tomato stem vinegar

that kind of brings a bright green, grassy punch

to anything that you wanna put it on.

It also actually works really well

with like a neutral spirit, like vodka.

Put it in salad dressings.

Another thing that you can do with these stems,

dry these tomato stems so that they're brittle and cracky,

and grind them into a powder.

It'll look like drugs, but it'll taste like a garden.

Honestly, I have no idea the exact number

of applications we talked about for tomatoes today,

but I guarantee you there's way more out there

that we didn't even get to.

Even more importantly is next time you look at a tomato,

don't just see that thing that you turn into pasta sauce.

See a thickener, a flavor sponge, a source of color,

a source of acid, a source of sweetness,

and a way to make stuff turn golden brown in the oven.

Because that way of thinking about ingredients

is how you really broaden your horizons in the kitchen.