Pickled green tomatoes

By early to mid October, as temperatures drop and daylight hours shorten, tomatoes grown outside stop ripening. At this point it is best to pick all the remaining fruit on the plants. There are always a lot of unripe green tomatoes that need using. Last year I wrote about making green tomato chutney, one of the classic ways of using green tomatoes. This year, I thought I would also experiment with pickling green tomatoes whole. Pickles are prominent in Turkish cuisine, and a bowl of mixed pickles, or tursu, often appears in a meze spread. I have a lovely Turkish grocers round the corner, which sells a wide range of Turkish pickles. Earlier this year I bought a jar of pickled green tomatoes. They were delicious, and inspired me to have a go at making my own pickled green tomatoes. Pickled green tomatoes have a fresh clean flavour and crunchy texture, and can be added to a meze spread, but are also delicious with cheese and cured meats.

Green tomato chutney

2014 has been a great year for growing tomatoes. My outdoor-grown tomatoes continued to ripen nicely in the dry sunny weather we experienced throughout September. However, there comes a time every autumn when the longer nights and weakening sunshine mean that the tomatoes stop ripening. In cool wet Septembers that point can come sooner rather than later, especially if the plants contract late-season blight, in which case it is best to cut your losses and pick all the remaining healthy fruit. Last weekend, the last in September, we decided to harvest the remaining tomatoes. I might have been tempted to leave them for another week or so, but we are about to move house, and I thought we should pick them before we left.

Piccalilli

Piccalilli is one of those curious British foods which, similar to chutney, is an anglicized version of traditional Indian pickles. Like chutney, piccalilli uses vinegar to preserve vegetables. Unlike chutney, the vegetables are not cooked with the vinegar, but rather pickled in a thickened, spiced vinegar solution. The acidity of the vinegar prevents bacterial development, thus preserving the vegetables, which would otherwise start to deteriorate rapidly after picking. Even more so in the old days in British India when no-one had fridges.