Tomato - vo.rs

Kachumbari: East Africa's Tomato-and-Onion Cooler

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:08:00 +0000

Kachumbari is the salad that sits on nearly every table across Kenya and Tanzania, a simple relief of raw tomato, onion, chilli and lime that cuts through rich stews, grilled meat and pilau. The one change here is to the onion: rather than tossing it in raw, it gets a five-minute quick-pickle in lime juice and a little sugar first, which tames its sharpest edge without losing the crunch and bite that make kachumbari what it is.

Insalata Tricolore, Done with Actual Tomatoes

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 10:51:00 +0000

Most versions of insalata tricolore fall down before the dressing ever touches the plate, because the tomatoes go on watery and under-seasoned and the mozzarella is the bland, rubbery kind sold in blocks for pizza. This one fixes both problems at the root: the tomatoes are salted and rested so they taste of something rather than diluting everything around them, and torn burrata stands in for mozzarella, its cool, creamy centre spilling out to do the job a firmer cheese cannot.

A Proper Panzanella: Stale Bread's Finest Hour

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Panzanella exists because Tuscan cooks refused to bin a loaf just because it had gone hard. Stale bread, revived with tomato juice and good oil, is the whole point of the dish, and a fair number of modern versions miss it by using soft, fresh bread that turns to mush. This one goes a step further than a plain soak: the bread is charred first, so it picks up a bitter, smoky edge that a simple stale crust never gets, and the dressing leans on caper brine as well as tomato juice, giving the whole bowl a savoury backbone.