Skip to main content

Faux “Fried” Coral Tomatoes

An August garden is pregnant with expectations.

The garden I share with my friends Karen and Kate has a tomato jungle. 

The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots.

Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its toll as well. 

No matter. The tomatoes seem to ripen from pearl green to bloody red as you watch. The vines are heavy with fruit.

We know that soon – very soon – we’ll be overrun with ripe tomatoes. We wait. We watch. We talk about canning, tomato sauce and ratatouille.

Impatient for the harvest, we’ve been experimenting with fried green tomatoes.  It’s a preview of what’s to come. It’s a wonderful summer supper. And it’s a delicious way to thin the vines for better growth.

The following recipe is “faux fried” because it’s baked. The oil in frying can overpower the delicate flavor of baby tomatoes. 

We also use Panko flakes, Japanese breadcrumbs made of wheat flour, soybeans, and other things, instead of the traditional corn meal.

I refer to coral tomatoes because their cooked flavor will send you to your knees savoring the flavor.

Any tomato up to ripe one can be fried (or faux fried). We searched out sister tomatoes in clusters that had an almost ripe tomato. Despite my elegy to coral tomatoes, don’t pass up the green ones.

You'll need:

4 to 6 green to coral tomatoes, cut into ¼-inch thick slices

2 eggs, beaten

2/3 cup evaporated milk

1/3 cup water

Salt and pepper

1.5 cups Panko flakes 

Salt and pepper each side of the tomato slices.  Grease a large shallow baking pan or cooking sheet. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Mix the eggs, milk and water in a shallow bowl. Put the Panko flakes (or cornmeal, matzoh meal or flour) in another shallow dish.  

Dip each slice into the liquid, then coat both sides with crumbs. (For a thicker coating, do this step twice for each slice.) Arrange the tomatoes in a single layer in the prepared baking pan.  The slices should not touch.  

Bake 10 minutes. Turn each slice over. Bake another 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Know Your Soil For Best Garden Results

I've always taken soil for granted. It was there. You put seeds into it. You put water on it. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit or vegetables. Gayle Weinstein, author of Xeriscape Handbook; A How-To Guide to Natural, Resource-Wise Gardening , takes a different view: “Soil . . . acts as a highway between life and death, land and atmosphere, plants and animals.” It stores water, air and nutrients and makes it possible for an exchange of elements and chemical reactions to occur, she adds. She describes soil as being animal, vegetable and mineral combined. Here are six tests Gayle recommends for getting to know your soil. Grab a shovel and a quart jar. Dig up two cups of dry soil two-to-six inches deep from the areas you want to test. Gather a glass of water, dish washing detergent and paper towels. A soil pH kit, a meter or litmus paper will be needed for the final test.

Order in the Garden

The first year that Fink Farm was in operation, we devoured Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening .  A 10-foot by 12-foot plot isn't much.  We pegged off one-foot measures on two adjoining sides, and rolled some pebbled pavers into position to give us places to stand amongst our soon to be thriving garden. But then things started spinning out of alignment. For starters, it became clear that running string across the dirt in one-foot increments was going to create one nasty arrangement for digging on any scale at all. All I could envision was a broken ankle from hopping over all that string.

Water saving ollas

When you're saving water, the first step is to get the water where it's needed in the most direct way possible. No sprinkler heads rising like swans in a ballet to spew water 18-inches above the ground, splashing sidewalks and gutters. No sprinklers nodding back and forth sending sprays of water as tall as a child. Nope, it's irrigation dripping directly at the base of a stem or water bubbling at dirt-level. You can't get much more direct than an olla (pronounced oy-ya ). In the irrigation world, an olla is a clay pot, usually with a round bottom and a longish thin neck that is planted in the dirt next to plants that need water.  The dirt is mounded around the pot so that only the end of the neck shows. Water is poured into the opening to fill the buried pot. The clay absorbs water that in turn is absorbed by the dry earth surrounding it.  The plant gets a slow steady supply of water. Because the pot is buried, there's little exposure to the air and evaporatio...