Prepare tomatoes for perfect chutney

If you don’t peel the tomatoes as you cook down the fruit to become chutney, you will get tiny rolled-up fragments of tomato skin.

These don’t break down and can get stuck in the back of your throat on consumption not making a very pleasant eating experience.

The seeds can make a sauce, in this case a chutney, bitter when they are cooked down so out they come as well.

In some cases, when you are making tomato sauce, for example, you can leave this step until you have cooked down the chopped tomatoes for a while, running them through a mouli or sieve to make a smooth sauce, leaving the skin and seeds in the equipment.

For chutney, we are not after a smooth sauce, liking it, like I like my husband, a little bit chunky.

So, the skin comes off, and the seeds are removed before the fruit is chopped into rough pieces.

For the official French way, the peeled and deseeded tomatoes would all be chopped or diced into equal-sized 5mm to 1cm pieces, but we are not doing that today as it is fancier than we need for tomato chutney.

Tomato Concasse

Or if you want, just call it peeled and deseeded tomatoes

Today, 2.5kg of store-bought truss tomatoes were prepared.

Method

Step one: Using a sharp knife, remove the core of each tomato and score the bottom with a cross

Step two: Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Gently place each tomato in the boiling water for about 1 minute.

This is all it takes for the water's heat to remove the skin. If you leave the fruit in the water for too long, it will go mushie and there will be more tomato in the boiling water than in your bowl to use later.

The 2.5kg of tomatoes didn’t all fit in the saucepan at once, so the process was completed in two batches.

Step three: Remove the tomatoes from the boiling water with a slotted spoon and place them in ice water.

This cools the tomatoes in an instant and helps the skin slide straight off.

Step four: Peel off the skin

As you go along, place all the scraps in a bowl, because, like everything here, they will be used to make tomato powder later.

Step five: Cut the tomatoes in half and, using a teaspoon, scoop out the seeds.

These, too, go in the scrap bowl.

At this point, you could cut them into a concasse, but we are going to roughly chop them next time when cooking chutney.

At the end of the process, there were 2.133 kg of peeled and deseeded tomatoes and 932g of scraps.

The weights don’t equal 2.5kg, but that is more likely the extra water picked up in the process.

I’ll see you in the kitchen next time to cook tomato chutney.

– Jaci

Tune in next time, when Jaci finally makes tomato chutney. Do you have a favourite tomato recipe that Jaci can cook? Drop her a line at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au