The recipes for fried green tomatoes all look so delicious. Just drop that tasteless filling, and you’d have yourself some fine hush puppies.
It’s starting to look like I’m going to have a bumper crop of green tomatoes. Despite my best efforts (see Post G23-064), I think the cold has gotten to them. One night at 46F, and a couple of nights skirting 50F, may have been enough to destroy their ability to ripen. In any case, there’s been no new ripening in the past couple of days.
This post is about what to do with several dozen baseball-sized green tomatoes. After ringing the changes — are they toxic (no), what can you do with them (lots) — for me, it boils down to this: The fact that you can eat something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, even if you already own it.
When you go to great lengths to disguise a food — which pretty much sums up most green tomato recipes — you probably ought to stop and think about what you’re doing. My bottom line is to eat them if you actually like them, not because you happen to have them.
For me, green tomatoes are not some exotic regional American delicacy. They are an unfortunate byproduct of the end of the growing season. Unless you are so poor that you need the scant calories they provide, or you like the taste, going to a lot of effort to disguise them seems kind of crazy.
Compost is always an option.
Would it kill you to eat a few green tomatoes?
Green they are. Food they might be.
No. But it’s worth the effort to check first. Because some people say that it might.
Suppose you were planning to consume a food plant that comes from a bad family. A family of plants for whom the Wikipedia descriptions almost uniformly contain the phrase “highly poisonous”.
The close relatives of this food plant include:
- deadly nightshade (belladonna)
- datura/jimson weed/devil’s snare/locoweed
- mandragora/mandrake
- henbane/insane root/witches’ plant
- tobacco
Given all those shady relatives, you might be well advised to look into potential toxicity before you go eating that food. Particularly before eating (e.g.) the unripe fruit of the plant.
Such is the case with tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant. Those foods are in the same family as the plants above. For example, green potatoes are, in fact, somewhat poisonous. They contain a relatively high concentration of solanine, a glycoalkaloyd poison. Consumption of a large quantity of green potatoes — particularly the skins — can certainly make you ill and in rare cases could kill you.
At one point, a handful of seemingly reputable sources suggested that green tomatoes contained the same glycoalkaloyd, and so were at least moderately poisonous. But they turned out to be wrong.
The good news is that green tomatoes are only slightly toxic. (Yay?) The analogous chemical in tomatoes is tomatine, which is not nearly so toxic as the solanine in green potatoes. (Let alone the atropine, scopalamine, and other poisons in deadly nightshade.)
How do scientists know that tomatine isn’t very toxic? Simple observation. Green tomatoes are high in tomatine. Frying doesn’t destroy tomatine. People eat fried green tomatoes without notable reports of ill effects. Ergo, tomatine must not be very toxic. You can eat it, because other people eat it. An illustration of doing science without doing experiments.
That said, tomatine increases the permeability of the gut (at least in vitro). If you have issues related to gut health, arguably the best thing you can do with green tomatoes is compost them.
Otherwise, it looks like there is no particular risk in eating a modest amount of green tomatoes.
There is limited evidence that green tomatoes may have health benefits. There is some suggestion that tomatine has anti-cancerc effects (reference) and cholesterol-lowering effects (news report). Further, tomatine has antifungal and antibiotic properties. So, far from being toxic, green tomatoes may actually be good for you.
In any case, due diligence done. Green tomatoes are not poisonous, as these things are reckoned. A healthy individual may may cook and eat them in moderation without significant risk of injury.
People actually buy green tomatoes? On purpose?
Source: Instacart
This was unexpected: My local Harris Teeter carries them, right now. Here in the NoVA ‘burbs. Available on Instacart. And, to be clear, based on the pictures, that’s not a green-when-mature variety of tomato. That appears to be a green-as-in-unripe tomato.
When I buy unripe fruit at the store, it’s a mistake. I mean, when’s the last time you saw (e.g.) unripe oranges at the store? Can you pick up a package of inedible green strawberries? Rock-hard green apples? It happens, but it’s always unintentional.
Nobody grows tomatoes for the sake of eating unripe green tomatoes. They are an unavoidable by-product of the end of the growing season. Poor people ate them, of necessity, as food calories were scarce, and they are edible. Or out of a sense of not wanting to waste food (broadly construed), particularly after doing the work to grow it yourself.
But, I now see that, in season, in parts of the South, it appears to be common to find green tomatoes offered in the grocery store. I never knew, even though I can recall my Dad making fried green tomatoes a few times. (But then again, he also liked rutabaga, liver, and hamburger tartare.)
Perhaps it’s the Spaghetti-o/Kraft mac-n-cheese effect. People want to have a taste of what they grew up with. No matter how objectively bad the food actually is, to your adult palate.
At the extreme, if there ever was a food of last resort, it would have to be chitlins. And yet, people in the South still cook chitlins. These are people who have enough money to buy other food. And they eat them, even after smelling them cooking. Compared to that, fried green tomatoes don’t even move the needle on the foods-of-necessity scale.
It’s déjà zucchini, all over again.
The problem with green tomatoes isn’t toxicity. The problem is that they taste like green tomatoes. Which for me means, like not much of anything. If that’s an acquired taste, I surely have never managed to acquire it. The challenge is to hide, cover up, or otherwise disguise the green tomatoes so that they can either be consumed unnoticed, or pass for being some sort of desirable food.
Luckily, any gardener who has had success growing summer squash has been through this drill before. So your prior practice at hide-the-zucchini applies here. But, in addition, there are some new options based on the fact that green tomatoes have the extra added bonus of being rock-hard, in addition to being unripe.
A quick internet search yields these uses for green tomatoes, in no particular order:
First, you may can green tomatoes just as you would can red tomatoes, including the addition of acid to ensure safe canning. Or, if you like fried green tomatoes, you can freeze sliced green tomatoes, and thaw them later for that use (Reference, National Center for Home Food Preservation).
All this does is postpone the inevitable, as you are then left with green tomatoes. Nicely canned or frozen green tomatoes. But you haven’t really disposed of the goods.
Second, you can pickle them. I already have that underway. The results are quite tasty, in that the pickle flavor almost completely overwhelms the green tomato flavor. But I don’t really want more than the gallon of pickled green tomatoes that I already have in progress. These lacto-fermented picked green tomatoes may be canned for shelf-stable preservation.
Third, you can make variations on sweet relish, including green tomato sweet relish, chutney, mincemeat, and jam. I believe that all of these may be canned.
Fourth, you can make non-sweet relishes and similar by using them to replace tomatillos in Hispanic recipes. So, e.g., green tomato salsa verde. Again, I believe that, if properly made, these can be safely canned at home, just as traditional salsa verde may be canned.
Fifth, you can just straight-up cook them, including fried green tomatoes, grilled green tomatoes, and roasted green tomatoes.
Sixth, you can eat them raw, including sliced in vinaigrette marinade, in salads, or on toast with cheese.
Seventh, you can use them to make a green soup, blending them after cooking, or blending them raw. The former is more-or-less green tomato salsa verde, run through a blender. The latter is green tomato gazpacho, same idea.
Eighth, you can replace red tomatoes in recipes for chili, or pizza. There, sliced or diced green tomatoes take the place of similarly-cut red tomatoes. They typically are a minor part of the overall dish, and plausibly you can hide the flavor of green tomatoes.
Ninth, you can replace red tomatoes in recipes for tomato sauce or ketchup. In that case, they are the star of dish, and plausibly you aren’t trying to hide the flavor of green tomatoes. For reasons I cannot fathom, you are trying to celebrate that flavor.
Tenth, you can cook them and disguise them with cheese. This class of recipes includes a savory cheese-and-green-tomato pie, and variations on green tomato casserole.
Eleventh, there appear to be a couple of traditional Indian recipes that specifically call for green tomatoes. Green tomato dal, and a coconut-milk-based Indian-spiced soup.
Finally, there are two green-tomato desserts, both of which hide the the very fact that you are consuming green tomatoes. One is essentially zucchini bread, made with shredded green tomatoes instead of zucchini. The other is a mock apple pie, using green tomato slices in place of tart baking apples.
The final cut.
I’ve already started the one green tomato dish that I like, pickled green tomatoes.
Everybody likes cake. So the green tomato version of zucchini bread seems like a good bet.
And it’s tough to argue with a good cheese-and-____ casserole. Or lasagna. Even if the blank is filled in with green tomatoes.
Beyond that, I see a lot of recipes for foods that I don’t normally eat. If I don’t eat them in the original, I can’t imaging I’d be enthusiastic about eating the green tomato version. Hush puppies (a.k.a. fried green tomatoes) being the exception, in that I’ll gladly eat those if somebody else cooks them.
After exhausting those uses, any remainder of the crop is going to become compost.
Pictures for this post are all from Gencraft.com.
