FOOD SPECIAL..The Tomato Test

Forget the purée and soup; with a bit of imagination you can whip up interesting sauces too

Heirloom tomatoes are quite the buzzword in smart-dining echelons today, even though we, in India, seem content to make do with hybrid varieties; indeed actively choosing thick-skinned supermarket fruit over tarter desi variants. But whether or not you are particular about the type you are using, there is no way you can escape the tomato’s tyranny — and, well, blessing — in your kitchen.
Among the most popular culinary ingredients, the tomato has, of course, also come to be the bane of Indian cooking as recipes are bastardised and “restaurantised” with thick tomato purée, no matter what’s cooking — matar-paneer, qorma, even meen moilee. Ironically, tomatoes were not part of Indian regional cooking till the late 19th century and used primarily by English memsahibs even then.
Dhabaesque or hotel cooks who contrived to add tomatoes to everything much later in our culinary history (post-Partition) may have done a great disservice to India’s varied cuisines, but they also seem to have been working on an instinctive knowledge of the ingredient: tomatoes are rich in glutamic acid, a known provider of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that makes everything so much more appetising.
That’s why perhaps tomatoes have
spread so widely from South America to all kinds of cuisines and countries. Their favourite domain, however, is the Italian kitchen bursting with the ripeness, sweet-and-sourness of its beloved pomodoro (“golden apple”; the French, on the other hand, christened it “love apple”— pomme d’amore).
It took me a trip to Melbourne to appreciate the quaint social ritual of making passata (tomato sauce) at the onset of summer and now practiced by immigrant communities keen to keep memories of food and culture alive. (Tomatoes are cheap and plentiful this time of the year so it makes sense to make sauce for later use; passatamaking involves entire families and friends over wine and picnicy lunches.)
At Mangia Mangia, run by two Italianorigin Aussie women, Teresa and Angela, coffee, home-made biscotti, plates of garna and spaghetti all accompany lots of chatter and excitement as eager learners pitch in, halving tomatoes, boiling and pasting with little bits of basil. Most Italian families, including at Mangia Mangia, use a simple machine to paste the tomatoes, called “passapomodoro”, through which tomato pulp must literally “pass” and be sieved.
Sauced Up
I can’t really see anyone in India buying this even though making ketchup used to be a pretty similar ritual this time of the year for domestic goddesses of my mother’s generation who abhorred anything not home-made. But having bottles freely available on retail shelves should be no reason to not attempt your own pasta sauce: Diva’s Ritu Dalmia has a basic and excellent recipe in her cookbook Italian Khana, which can be paired with not just pasta but also meats or veggies.
Halve and deseed tomatoes and then quarter them. Heat olive oil in a pan, add garlic and a pinch of chilli flakes and then the tomatoes. Cook over high heat till these begin to thicken and then break and stir with a wooden spoon. Add some fresh
basil and salt and water if the sauce is too dry. When the tomatoes are squishy, run through a food processor for just a minute — the purée shouldn’t be too fine; there should be chunks of tomatoes in it. Use with pasta, chicken or a dish like eggplant parmesan. The tomatoes in any pasta sauce should be Roma; but any thinskinned variety is fine. Indian ones tend to be tarter so chefs here are known to add sugar though Ritu uses leeks and carrots to add sweetness to her deluxe sauce.
Gel Well
If olive oil and tomatoes gel, so does mustard and the fruit. An Indian sauce for the table is tamatar ki chutney, with variations across north and east India. My home recipe is simple: splutter black mustard seeds in mustard oil. Add chopped tomatoes, salt and sugar and a pinch of chilli powder if you like. Let the tomatoes cook till squishy. Mash with the back of a spoon. Eat with hot rice and dal!
I will leave you to figure out the recipe for the best makhani sauce. Hyderabad has the amazing tamatar ka kut flavoured with zeera, coriander and curry leaves. But what I have managed to wheedle out of chef Raymond Sim at RED, a Singaporestyle Chinese restaurant at MBD Radisson in Noida, are two versatile Chinese recipes — even though the cuisine does not use tomatoes quite as much. For sweet and sour sauce, mix 1 ½ soup spoon of rice vinegar, 1 soup spoon of mixed fruit jam, 2 soup spoons tomato ketchup, 1 spoon plum sauce, water and sugar.
Chilli vinegar chicken, chef’s prized and hitherto-secret recipe, uses 20 g of tomatoes with 60 g black vinegar and 20 g of oyster sauce as a dressing for 150 g chicken. First fry the chicken. Sauté garlic, capsicum, ginger and chillies and toss in the chicken. Add the sauce on top.
Tomatoes are great for salads too; whether it is in a salsa, with crumbled feta or our own kachumber. I saw an interesting spin in Italy when a chef used little pipettes (available at chemists’) filled with extra virgin olive oil to skewer tomatoes, baby mozzarella and basil leaves in a cocktail rendition of the classic Caprese. Try it.

:: Anoothi Vishal ET120318