smoked tomatoes ?

[Minnesota Mato]

Does anyone smoke ( in a smoker ) tomatoes? I was just screwing around a couple of years ago and smoked a batch of tomatoes. The only info I found they used oak but I tried it and I found I like hickory better. I smoke it, dry it, then put it in a coffee grinder and turn it to powder. I use it for seasoning, and put it in chili.Mix it with one cup mayo, one cup sourcream and two tablespoons powder and it is an awesome dip. Everyone I let try it wants to buy some so I have to devout more tomatoes to smoke. I never hear anyone else that does this, does anyone else smoke tomatoes? if so how do you use them?

[Boutique Tomatoes]

Just finished canning 18 pints of smoked tomato salsa. I need to try dehydrating some after smoking, that sounds interesting.

I saved 2 quarts of the liquid off of the smoked tomatoes to experiment with as some of the liquid in a winter squash soup tomorrow.

[Minnesota Mato]

What wood did you use and how did you make your salsa?

[Cole_Robbie]

The smoked mater is a neat idea. I like to fire-roast romas over a wood fire before making sauce with them.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

Apple. What I do is make a fire roasted tomato sauce first by coring, quartering and seeding tomatoes and putting them over the fire until the skins are blackened. Then I put them in a colander over a stainless steel bowl and let the water drain. One pass through the Sauce Master and I have a nice thick flavorful tomato sauce with bits of blackened tomato running through it.

Then I do the same thing to more tomatoes and load them into the smoker, smoking them for about an hour at a medium heat with lots of smoke. Let these drain as well and run them through the Sauce Master with it's salsa screen

The actual recipe I use is Annie's Salsa recipe, just with the addition of making my own fire roasted tomato sauce and smoking the tomatoes (because of the breakdown of the tomatoes from smoking I end up using more raw tomatoes by volume than the original recipe, I use 8 cups of processed smoked tomatoes. I use a mix of apple cider vinegar and key lime juice instead of straight vinegar and test for pH, my pH generally runs less than 3.5.

[Cole_Robbie]

Mark, what variety of tomato are you using for that sauce? Do you think the seeding is necessary if you're using a paste tomato that doesn't have many seeds?

[Boutique Tomatoes]

I seed mostly out of habit. Many years of culinary work doing it to minimise any bitterness in tomato sauces from the seeds. Even though the Sauce Master will remove the seeds from the tomato sauce (not with the salsa screen) I still seed them first.

I mostly use the paste types, although if I'm short on tomatoes I will use anything I can get. It just takes more of the non-pastes to come up with the same volume once most of the water is out of them.

[Cole_Robbie]

By 'sauce master' do you mean a hand mill? I have an antique lower-tech version of that. It looks like a mortar & pestle. It's a cone-shaped sieve and a wooden stick to mash the tomatoes into it. It's good for making juice with pulp if the tomatoes are boiled a bit first. It removes skin and seed. But my problem with the romas I fire-grill is that I want the skin to stay, but not the seed. I'm not sure how to accomplish that.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

Yes. I've got one of the old ones too, good for the kids to get a workout and see how hard we had it in the 'old days'. ;-)

If you seeded them before grilling then you could just toss them in the food processor to retain the skin. If you're just worried about getting the bulk of the seeds out it doesn't take a lot of time with some practice.

[Cole_Robbie]

ok, thanks.

[bbjm]

Cole Robbie, Don't you end up with globs of skin in your sauce or does it break up when you cook it? I've just always assumed you can't have skins in sauce.

[Cole_Robbie]

I use a stick blender on everything in the sauce pot after it cooks a bit. Here's a pic of it:

I got it as a present and didn't know what it was at first, but now I use the thing all the time. The thing I use most is the stick blender attachment on the right. You can puree and cook at the same time.

[Texas Blues]

I smoke tomato's all the time. I use a Luhr-Jensen Mini-Chief electric smoker. This last batch I used alder chips.


IMG_3826.jpg

[biscgolf]

i smoke a lot of juliet tomatoes every year. i use either hickory or oak as i thought the fruit woods gave a bit of an off taste. if i don't use them immediately for salsa i either freeze them or put them in the dehydrator. most recent use is chopping the dried ones up and putting in mac and cheese.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

I just opened the first jar of this years batch of the smoked salsa and when the seal popped you could instantly smell the smoke. I think I'm going to have to grow a row of tomatoes just for the smoker next year.

The Juliet's I've seen mentioned elsewhere, but they're not one I've tried. After all the issues I had this year with cracking I'm going to bend and grow a few F1's next year as an insurance crop. Does this one have a good meaty texture so there is something left once it's smoked and dried?

I tried drying several cherry types this year and was shocked at how thin they were when they came out of the dehydrator.