Pickled Green Tomatoes & The Butcher and the Vegetarian
This year’s tomato track record isn’t all that bad yet and we’re immediately jumping on the pickling band-wagon. The current tomato plant count is 4 out of 20 died due to disease, which is much less than what we suffered last year. In 2009, the whole nation suffered a tomato crisis where a late blight hammered many crops and home gardens.
Some tomatoes are more disease resistant than others, so with fingers tightly crossed, were thinking that the dead plants were the weaker varieties.
Too many green tomatoes to count!
Pickled Green Tomatoes Recipe
Still, all the little green tomato globes hanging on the vines are examples of mother nature at her best. Different shapes, shades and sizes of green tomatoes are popping up everywhere and we can’t keep up with the count. If all goes well, these tomato babies will be plump, red , sweet, juicy and ripe in a month or so!
Again, our fingers are tightly crossed for a bumper tomato crop. The wait for the clusters to change hue is always rewarding because every day, they change a little bit in color, size and shape. Yes, we stalk our tomatoes every morning, like every good gardener should. 😉
The vines that did start to die back didn’t all go to waste. After treating the plants with organic neem oil and clipping back the weaker branches, some survived their initial scare and we were able to gather the green tomatoes and pickle them using Tara’s basic brine recipe.
Tara Weaver, writer of the lovely blog Tea and Cookies, had an easy and perfect basic pickling brine that can be customized in all sorts of directions. She suggested a sweet and sour option, which would be a refreshing take on our standard salty-sour brine. Like she says, play with your pickling brine and have fun.
If you’re a lover of great writing, then you probably are already reading Tara on her scrumptious blog. If you aren’t reading Tara yet, then you’ll be treated to her gorgeous prose. It’s a brilliant collection of essays that instantly transport you along in her food travels. Everything that Tara produces is a must-read. Her writing is an escape to a better place when you’re in need of something funny and uplifting.
Her award winning writing is like chatting with a good friend. Tara’s visual, comforting posts, candor and raw honesty are real and genuine.
Tara’s newest book, The Butcher and the Vegetarian, is a lovely example of why this woman has so much talent in every single one of her writing digits. We were immediately connected to this book because the premise of the book was a mirror image of us. When we first met, I was a vegetarian and Todd was all about the meat (he grew up on a cattle ranch).
While I was feasting on grilled tofu, he was gnawing on his favorite t-bone. He’s forever my cowboy.
This fun, funny, intelligent and thought provoking book about food and life says it all in the title: “One Woman’s Romp through a World of Men, Meat and Moral Crisis”. One would think that Tara’s book is a chick-flick on paper, a girl’s romantic Cinderella story about being swept away by an opposite, a knife wielding butcher.
But her book is so deep in her personal journey about eating meat for health reasons and she goes knee deep into the whole business and politics of meat. The culture of meat and its place in our current food chain are just few of the topics she touches on in some eye-opening chapters.
This book needs to be made into a movie and it’s so good that we won’t be surprised that it will one day. Grab a copy and read it now before our predictions come true.
Happy Summer & Green Tomatoes to you all!
-diane
Pickled Green Tomatoes Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 pounds small, green tomatoes (washed, stems removed)
- 2 quarts water
- 1 cup white vinegar
- 1/2 cup canning & pickling salt (can use sea salt or kosher salt, just make sure it fully dissolves)
- 2 teaspoons celery salt
- 2 cloves minced garlic
- chili flakes (optional for a little heat!)
- glass containers for pickling
Instructions
- In a large enough saucepan, add water, vinegar, kosher/sea salt bring to a strong simmer, stirring until the salt has all dissolved.
- Sterilize your glass containers by submerging them in a pot of boiling water.
- Place tomatoes in glass containers and add hot bring until the tomatoes are completely covers.
- Allow the bring in the jars to cool, then cover and put in fridge. You’ll want to wait a few days for the to flavor develop before eating.
- The tomatoes can keep in the fridge for a few months, as long as no mold, scum, spoiling occurs. Check the jars regularly.
Your pictures are very nice! I usually just take mine off the vine and eat with a little salt and pepper – pickling them was a nice new way to eat them! Thanks so much for sharing!
Hi Sam! Eating the green tomatoes with salt and pepper sounds delicious, we’ve never eaten them like that before!
I have so much green baby tomatoes I picked in our garden. I’m going to pickle them for the first time. Can’t wait to see and taste them when they are ready. Thanks for sharing the recepies!
I live in Wilm Del, I had the most beautify and sweet Tom’s. And their comming still I went and picked picked some small green ones and making your resp.right now. Looking forward to tasting them.Thanks
Yes this does sound good! From all over the internet, this recipe sounds like the one I am looking for. I do love tomatoes, but I would probably add some red tomatoes, a few onions, and will use some red tabasco peppers instead of the chili. But thank yall, and chances that I may come to you for a recipe again is VERRY likely
I followed instructions but I used kosher salt. I would use 1/2 the salt the recipe calls for the next time as they are almost too salty to eat.
This looks like a good idea to help me use the bazillon cherry tomatoes I have growing right now .I see the recipe calls for 2 quarts of water but I’m thinking that should be 2 cups. I don’t think one pound of tomatoes would be enoughh for all that liquid Am I right? My Recipe for refrigerator pickles calls for 2 cups water to 1 cup vinegar and that is just right for 4 pints. Also I always put the lids on my pickles when the brine is hot and let them cool to room temp before refriging them. This cooling of sealed jars causes the lids to contract and after they are further cooled in the frig the lids are sucked down tighter than a drum. I usually need to use a spoon handle to pop the lids off. No germs are getting in these babies….Thanks for the recipe !!
You can add a pepper for some hotness. broke in half it will make the brine wonderful. You can also pickle only in vinegar and water, or only in salt, but play with the herbs. Horseradish and celery sticks are a classic in my family. With some mustard seeds perhaps. My in-laws make this sweetly salty brine and they pickle together green tomatoes ( can be pickled even pink) and pears and cucumbers. Lovely mix
I’ve been wanting to make pickled green tomatoes for the first time this year as I have a TON of them left over from my garden. I’ve been reading about canning things a lot, since I’ve never done this before, and most of the recipes say to seal the jars using a boiling water bath. This one doesn’t. Isn’t it important to do that to kill any bacteria? Thanks for any insights!
Hi Erin,
We aren’t experts, so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt (pickling humor 😉 ). Since these are refrigerated pickles, and have enough salt and vinegar, as long as the tomatoes stay fully submerged, they should safely preserved in the fridge for several months. For canning to be stored in a pantry or if it isn’t a salty, vinegary brine, you’d definitely want to sterilize and seal with a boiling water bath. And if the pickles or their brine gets moldy or funky, it is time to toss. Hope that helps. Good luck!
T & D
Love this, (naturally) and am for sure going to check out the book.
One little note though…subbing a 1/2 cup of Kosher salt for 1/2 cup of pickling salt is going to yield vastly different results.
Also…my tip for green tomatoes is to salt them and let rest for at least eight hours, then rinse before pickling. Why? Pre-salting draws out some moisture, which dilutes your brine.
Can’t wait to try this otherwise! Thanks for sharing.
xoxo,
Rachael
(The recipe still says “celery salt.” )
I just harvested a huge amount of green tomatoes. Time to pickle!
Why do the tomatoes have to be stored in the frig?
Hi! I just made 5 pints w/ this recipe. Did you by chance mean celery *seeds*? The recipe says celery salt. Looks like seeds in the pic, and seeds would make more sense to me than more salt.
I hope the recipe is right; I just harvested my toms to the max for these…
Please let me know. And thanks for the fun blog.
Sara- yes! thanks for correction. The recipe correction should say celery seeds. thank you.
Hi, this may be a silly question, but how would you adjust this recipe for larger green tomatoes? That’s all I have in my garden at the moment and would love to give this a try. Would you quarter them? Thanks for any help.
Not silly at all. For us the cut would depend on what we were going to jar them in. If the tomatoes were still small enough to fit in a widemouth canning jar, we’d probably cut the tomatoes into wheels. They just look kinda cool. However if they were too big to fit that way, then probably in quarters or smaller. Mostly it is just an aesthetic choice. Don’t forget to set some aside to fry! The big ones are perfect for that!
I have a page with recipes for green tomato recipes and I would like to use (or reference) your recipe and an image to accompany it.
Thank you for your consideration. MG