TracyFood

Recipe: Green Tomatoes Parmesan 23 November 2007 7:43 am

Posted by Tracy in : seasonality, garden, recipes, vegetarian, eating, books, cooking , trackback

So once upon a time, I think even before I saw its more famous movie cousin, I got a library copy of Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables, a book I do recommend and might even review around here someday (the movie is also quite charming and worthy of an entry all by itself). I did not cook many of the recipes in Farmer John’s Cookbook, but I was inspired by one little line: the claim that green tomatoes can be substituted for up to one quarter of the eggplant in any eggplant-using recipe. Neat! And of course, I was not about to let a good idea lie — if the substitution works a little, I thought, why not go whole hog? And so I broke out my favorite eggplant parmesan recipe, from The New Best Recipe, and started mucking around, and this is the result, and it is pretty delicious, if I do say so myself.

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A few notes before I get too deep into recipe madness: First, happy Buy Nothing Day! I thought this recipe would be especially appropriate for BND because I didn’t have to buy anything to make it, but rather cobbled it together from stuff that was around the house already anyway. Even if you’re the type to go out shopping on Black Friday (I gotta say, better you than me), I hope you’re also into using up what you’ve got at home instead of letting it go to waste. But enough with the anticonsumerist preaching! This dish is a good way to use the last of a season’s tomatoes, the ones that didn’t get ripe and seem to stare at you on the vines, as if to say “oh please don’t let us go to waste!” Also you can use random old stale bread for your breadcrumbs, and the last time I made this recipe (Tuesday night, to be exact), I actually didn’t even use any new eggs — I had egg whites left over from a previous baking adventure, and those worked just fine for making the breading. So what you’re about to read is a (sort of) thrifty invention!

Next, cooking this recipe is a pretty elaborate project, but what that really means is it’s a great opportunity for a little kitchen teamwork. While lots of the steps can overlap (sauce made while the tomatoes are in the oven, etc.) it can be sped up or at least made simpler if two people work on it at once, and I’ll try to note those handy task-sharing opportunities in my instructions.

The last thing I want to note about this dish is that it can serve either two or four, depending on whether or not you serve it on pasta (another clever thrifty trick for stretching food, yay!)

What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)

For the Tomatoes

1 pound green tomatoes, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices (in my case it was like 5-6 beefsteak-sized tomatoes, and I noticed that the roma/plum types had too much air space inside)
1 tablespoon kosher salt
colander
bowl
4 ounces stale bread (mine was from the random bread scraps I keep in the freezer, and I did not bother to thaw it)
food processor (sorry, but it really will make this recipe a lot more fun and easy)
1 ounce Parmesan (or Romano or Asiago or other hard aged Italian-style cheese), grated (1/2 cup)
1/4 to 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
big Ziploc-type plastic bag (go for the half-gallon)
salt and ground black pepper
2 large eggs (or the whites of 3-4 large eggs and a splash of oil to compensate for their lack of yolks)
3-4 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 pie pans or deep plates
wire rack and one more baking sheet (optional but very nice, and if you’ve got a toaster oven that came with them you’re all set)

For the Tomato Sauce

1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes (or 2 14.5-ouncers, in which case it should be one diced, one crushed)
extra-virgin olive oil
4-5 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/8 teaspoon (a few healthy shakes) crushed red pepper (red pepper flakes)
1-2 tablespoons pesto (or a few tablespoons chopped fresh basil, if you’ve got it handy, perhaps thanks to some clever storage techniques?)
salt and ground black pepper
frying pan or saucepan or whatever, for making sauce in
heatproof spoon or spatula or somesuch, for stirring

For the Rest

4 ounces mozzerella cheese, shredded (about 1 cup)
extra Parmesan cheese
small baking dish (I used a small casserole dish because it was a smaller surface area to cover than the 8×8 square pan).
optional but excellent: one pound pasta and a big pot of salted water to cook it in

What You Do

Toss the tomato slices and the salt in a large bowl; transfer to a colander set over the bowl and let stand until they’ve released at least 1-2 tablespoons liquid (this will take anywhere from 15-45 minutes).

Meanwhile, make sure you’ve got an oven rack on the middle position, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F with a rimmed baking sheet inside (this is to preheat the baking sheet so it can act like a frying pan). Note how this step could easily occur simultaneously with other steps, so you could ask someone else to do it for you!

While the oven is preheating and the tomatoes draining, grind the bread into crumbs in the food processor (use pulses, especially if your bread started out frozen, like mine). Transfer the bread crumbs to a pie plate or similar contraption, and combine with the 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan (or whatever) and some salt and pepper. DON’T WASH THE FOOD PROCESSOR BOWL YET! YOU WILL BE USING IT AGAIN! Also note that this would be a fine and dandy step to delegate.

When the tomatoes are drained to your satisfaction, spread the slices on paper towels (two or three thick, for sure) and cover with more paper towels and press to remove excess moisture (there will be plenty!) Also wipe off whatever excess salt you can.

After the tomatoes have been dried, toss them in the plastic bag with the flour and a few healthy grinds of fresh black pepper (maybe do this in two batches if you’ve got more than 8-10 slices, so there’s room for them to move). Shake it good! Don’t forget to seal the bag! This would be a totally fun step to delegate to someone who can shake it like they own it.

This next step would be very easy to do while someone else is wrangling (and shaking) tomato slices. Beat the eggs (or egg whites and oil) in your second pie pan (or shallow bowl or deep plate or whatever). Set up your assembly line: beaten eggs, bread crumbs and cheese and whatnot, optional baking sheet with wire rack.

You’ve probably guessed what happens next. You pull a slice of tomato out of the flour bag, shaking off the excess. Then you dredge it in the egg wash, then you put it in the bread crumb mixture and turn it till it’s coated on all sides, then you put it on the wire rack while you repeat the process until all the sliced tomato is breaded and ready to fry/bake in the oven. Aw, yeah. If you have leftover parmesan bread crumbs, don’t throw them out! I’ll suggest a use for them later. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good ideas for what to do with leftover floury weird egg wash.

So then you pull the pre-heated baking sheet out of the oven, spread on a good 3 tablespoons of oil or so, and put on the breaded sliced tomato. And then you bake it in the oven for 25-30 minutes, with a teeny break after 12-15 minutes to turn the slices of tomato and rotate the pan and admire how golden brown everything’s getting. Awesome!

Meanwhile, by which I mean while the tomatoes are baking, make a quick tomato sauce: either blend up half your tomatoes in the food processor or use two cans, whichever. Start by heating some olive oil, and when it’s hot, add the garlic. Next, the red pepper flakes. When the garlic is starting to turn golden brown around the edges, add the diced tomato, and then the puréed stuff or the can of crushed tomato, whatever you’re using. Lower the heat but let it all keep simmering so it reduces a little; at the end, season it with salt and pepper and a little pesto or basil if you’ve got it around. This is sort of a one-person job, but if there’s two of you working the other person can move on to the next step.

Don’t forget to grate your mozzerella cheese! And if you’re planning to serve this deliciousness on pasta (say a pound of it, for four servings), now would be a great time to get a big pot of water boiling!

When the green tomatoes are all oven-fried up, get ready to assemble a delicious casserole! Before you begin, remember: it is okay to have leftover tomato sauce. In fact, it’s pretty awesome. So don’t use too much, because you want your fried tomatoes to stay crispy, and you can always put more sauce on the food when you serve it. Got it? Great. Now, first put a layer of tomato sauce in the bottom of your casserole dish. Next, a layer of tomatoes (it’s okay for them to overlap, or not, whatever makes about half of them fit in a single layer). Cover that with a layer of about half the grated mozzerella cheese, and sprinkle that with a little bit of parmesan (or if you have extra parmesan-bread crumb mixture left over, go ahead and use that instead, but not too much). Next, more tomato sauce, and on top of that, the rest of the oven-fried green tomatoes. Finally, sprinkle on the rest of the mozzerella, and dab on a little bit more tomato sauce (but don’t cover the whole thing, because it’s nice to see the cheese get all melty and gooey).

Bake the casserole, uncovered, in the oven for 10 minutes or until you canNOT stand to watch it bubbling any longer. If you like delicious browned cheese, turn the broiler on for the last minute or so of baking. Maybe distract yourself by tending to the pasta, if you’re using any. (Or clean — by now you’ve made plenty of mess.) The casserole is done when the sauce is bubbling and the cheese is melted (or maybe even a little browned on top from the broiler if that’s how you roll). It will be too hot to eat for about ten minutes, but again, if you’re serving this over pasta you’ve got a great distraction activity all ready to go.

And there you go. Green Tomatoes Parmesan. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it, especially to save green tomatoes from frost. This recipe makes two big servings, but you can stretch it to four if you serve the deliciousness over pasta (in which case you will be very glad of any extra tomato sauce that didn’t go into the casserole, oh yes). You could probably get it all done in a very rushed hour and fifteen minutes, but I recommend saving this culinary adventure for a night when you’ve got two hours to spare, and maybe a nice glass of the tasty beverage of your choice. Enjoy!

Afterthoughts

Leftover Green Tomatoes Parmesan don’t keep particularly well (the breading loses its crunch, which is frankly sort of tragic), which is why this recipe only makes two big servings of casserole (though, as I keep mentioning over and over again, it could also be four servings of pasta topping). If you want to make more than two servings of casserole or four servings of pasta topping, this recipe doubles well, but you’ll need two baking sheets and a much bigger casserole dish (like a 7×11 or even a 9×13). Also you could of course make this recipe with a mixture of green tomatoes and eggplant, but 100% green tomatoes is more daring and creative and just plain cool, so there.

Finally, please note that I did not claim that this recipe is in any way low-fat. Oh, sure, I bake the tomatoes instead of pan-frying them, but I’m skeptical that this saves a significant amount of oil — I just prefer this approach because it frees up a little time for making sauce and cleaning up the copious amounts of mess created along with the breading. Likewise, while you can use egg whites instead of a whole egg for the breading, I only recommend this if you happen to have extra egg whites around — don’t throw out those egg yolks! You could use them to make pastry cream! Or cheesecake!