Green Tomatoes

Green Tomatoes

I heard on the evening weather bulletin that this has been the coldest summer in the UK since 1993.  Now I have no reason to disbelieve the man from the Met but I can’t say that I have any meteorological recollections of that year. You see my second child came in to the world in April 1993 literally kicking and screaming, and if memory serves me right, she didn’t stop either activity until well in to the autumn.  That summer, if I wasn’t driving her round the neighbourhood in my Renault Chamade at all hours, ostensibly to induce sleep, but actually to give the neighbours a break and share the pain equally between all the denizens of west Kent, then I was probably comatose while ‘her-indoors’ took a turn at the wheel.  However one thing I am sure of, I was not attempting to grow tomatoes.

If I had been, I might have been better prepared for the more or less total failure of my tomato crop this summer.

When I arrived here back in April, a couple of tomato plants were among the first things I bought. Moneymaker is a variety I have grown under glass several times before with great success.  It is a high yielding plant bearing good tasting, mid-sized fruits on fast growing vines.   In my old greenhouse I produced literally pounds and pounds of tomatoes and filled the chest freezer with bags of delicious salsa pomodoro.

As is often the way of things, shortly after I bought these plants a friend gave me some more, although these were different.  In addition to my Moneymaker I now had a couple of Big Boys, which again is a variety I have grown before, and a single plant of Sun Gold which was entirely new to me.

Big Boy is one of the most popular tomatoes in Britain.  With sweet, red, smooth-skinned fruit that can weigh up to a pound or more, they are strong growing plants with good disease resistance, and they have never been out of fashion since their introduction 60 years ago.

Sun Gold is listed as an orange coloured cherry tomato, exceptionally sweet and adaptable to most climates or soil types.

All the plants grew well and produced reasonable amounts of fruit, but the ensuing weeks just didn’t bring enough sunshine to ripen them.  I hung on all through the summer, keeping them watered, snipping off lateral trusses, pinching out growing tips and tying the plants in to the fence.  Above all I kept repairing them through some unseasonably windy weather. But for all my efforts, all I got was more and more green tomatoes, with one exception, the Sun Gold.

Sun Gold

This variety, that I had never heard of, has produced good quantities of the sweetest cherry tomatoes I’ve ever tasted.  They never turn red, just a beautiful orange colour, but don’t have any concerns that they aren’t ripe because they certainly pack taste.  It was also a nice compact plant which could easily be grown indoors on a window cill.  I will definitely seek out this variety in future.

For the rest however I was faced with a couple of kilos of green tomatoes, and with the weather starting to feel more autumnal every day I lost faith that they would ever ripen.  The other issue that I was facing was a quantity of fairly skanky apples slowly rotting in the box where they are stored.  These are mainly windfalls from a neighbour’s tree plus a few ‘wild’ apples that I found growing on the edge of a local wood.

So, reluctant to waste anything, I searched out the following recipe and yesterday I picked my green tomatoes and spent a couple of hours making a vat of green tomato chutney.

Recipe

Green Tomato & Apple Chutney

Ingredients:

1 kg green tomatoes, chopped
250g apples, cored, peeled & chopped
125g raisins, chopped
320g onions, peeled and chopped
20g root ginger, peeled and chopped
2 fresh chilies, chopped
1tsp salt
1/4 tsp allspice
250g brown sugar
300 ml vinegar (I used cider vinegar)

Method:

Simply place all the ingredients in a large pot or preserving pan and bring to the boil. Don’t worry that there isn’t enough liquid at the start. More will come out of the fruit as it cooks. Stir well until all the sugar has dissolved, then turn down the heat and let it simmer slowly for about one and a half hours.  This is important to make sure that the fruit softens properly and that all the flavours run together. The finished chutney should be a rich dark mixture with the consistency of thick jam.

Chutney has the consistency of thick jam

I’ve never used this recipe before but early tastings were encouraging.  A good chutney should be a complex mixture of flavours, sweet, sour, fruity and spicy all at the same time.

This is now packed away in sterilised jars to improve with age.  I won’t even think about them again for three months, when I will broach one for Christmas and hopefully I’ll have something tasty to go with the cold cuts on Boxing Day.  I would like to think that something special might come out of all my love and hard work in the early part of the summer, just as it did eighteen years ago.