This is the tomato sauce recipe that changed everything for me. So simple, but mind blowingly good. When I first made it, I couldn’t get my head around how it could be so good with just these few ingredients.
Continue reading “Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter”
I modified this recipe from one I saw in BA. It’s excellent and very easy to make. While the ingredients are basic, the flavor is incredible. As mentioned below, adding feta or goats cheese is a nice way to give even more flavor, but it is very good both ways.
Continue reading “Braised Chicken with Tomato and Kalamata Olives”
This is very easy to prepare and a great way to use up tomatoes. If you can’t find wonderful summer tomatoes, it really isn’t worth the effort. The key to this is the freshness of the ingredients.
Continue reading “Fresh Heirloom Tomato Puff Pastry Recipe”
One of the best things about summer is all of the fresh vegetables. One of the most challenging things about summer, is what to do with all of the fresh vegetables!
Faced with an avalanche of lovely cherry tomatoes, I decided to take action and created a simple tomato tart, which was easy to make and was a perfect use of my abundance of tomatoes.
Ingredients:
1 Pie Crust
1 1/2 cups Cherry Tomatoes, sliced in half
1 cup fresh Basil, chiffonade (rolled and sliced into thin ribbons)
1 cup Heavy Cream
4 Eggs
1 cup Gruyere Cheese, shredded
1 tsp Salt
Freshly Ground Black Pepper
Preparation:
Begin by blind baking the crust. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, use a fork to gently prick the crust on the bottom and on the sides.
Cut a piece of parchment paper so it overlaps the crust slightly and lay it onto the unbaked crust, and fill with dried beans. Push them so you have more beans on the sides and less in the middle. Then bake for 15 minutes.
After baking, remove the crust and lift out the parchment paper and allow the crust to cool. The beans can be stored and reused. They will be hot when they come out, so handle with care. Set the oven to 350 degrees.
Beat together your eggs, heavy cream, salt and pepper. Put your pie crust onto a baking sheet and arrange your tomatoes, basil and Gruyere cheese into the pie crust.
Gently pour the egg mixture over the ingredients, allowing it to come to just below the top of the crust. Do not overfill. Place into the oven and bake for 35-45 minutes. You can tell it’s done when you shake the tart, and the filling doesn’t move.
Remove, cool and serve with a salad.
This article is part of The Pasadena Chef Cooking School. Explore more cooking lessons, techniques, and ingredient guides here, The Pasadena Chef Cooking School
Now that autumn is just around the corner, I wanted to share a great tip about storing tomatoes. One year I planted 3 San Marzano tomato plants and I had so many tomatoes, it was impossible to cook them all. I was still getting baskets of tomatoes in late September, so I had to find a solution.
After picking another basket of beautiful San Marzanos, I just took them and put them into a gallon freezer bag and put them into the freezer. No washing, no fuss and they were still warm from the garden.
About two weeks later I remembered them and was expecting the worse, but when I took them out to make a sauce, they were perfect. I put a little bit of lukewarm water on them and the skins came right off and I then chopped them and made a wonderful sauce. They had lost none of their flavor.
The only important thing to remember, is that this will only work for tomatoes you plan on using for cooking, as the texture will not be suitable for slicing.
I picked my last batch in early October and then used them up until March of the following year. They had been frozen for almost 6 months and they were lovely and had lost none of their freshness.
This article is part of The Pasadena Chef Cooking School. Explore more cooking lessons, techniques, and ingredient guides here. The Pasadena Chef Cooking School