Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome back to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. This is our second regular monthly slot with money saving tips to make the fresh seasonal fruit and veg that I've been banging on about all month last longer, store better and go a bit further.
The idea is to help you get the best out of your fresh food, so we're spending less money, wasting less food and actually getting round to eating what we've bought.
So as I mentioned last month, I build my content around seasonal produce and my main product that I sell is a set of 12 children's books set in a veggie patch. Each book focuses on different fruit and veg that's in season that month and I chose the vegetables specifically to make sure that children explored lots of different plant families during the course of the year. So I'm using the produce from the books to talk through storage and money tips here so that we also cover them all during the course of the year. So this month, the book of the month is Tomato Says Sorry. So we're going to talk about tomatoes.
Whether you're picking up punnets of cherry tomatoes or packs of salad tomatoes from the supermarket or you're growing a few plants at home, the aim of this episode is to make sure you get the most out of them and they don't end up going wrinkly or mouldy at the back of the fridge.
Tomatoes are one of those foods that look like they're pretty easy to store at first glance but actually can be quite fussy. One of the first things to know about tomatoes is that they're not actually best stored in the fridge. Their texture and flavour is best at room temperature. The reason for that is that the cold can sometimes make them a bit more mealy textured and the taste can be a bit more bland. Quite a lot of the aroma compounds in the tomatoes are suppressed at low temperatures, which is why a lot of us will have these great memories of eating tomatoes straight from a plant in the sunshine in your granddad's greenhouse or something like that. It's because those aroma compounds are at their best then.
And their texture is also affected by cold because they are a warm climate food and their cell membranes are just not built for the cold so they can often break down in the fridge. They also don't retain water very well in the fridge. So basically if you put them in the fridge they can end up being a little mushier but also a bit drier as well as losing some of that flavour. So the best place for most fresh tomatoes is actually on the kitchen counter away from direct sunlight. Room temperature helps them stay juicy and keep their flavour.
They'll usually last a good few days this way if they were fresh when you bought them. I usually put mine on a plate on top of a paper towel with a little bit of space in between them. That way if any of them start to turn a bit soft or any juice comes out of them, any of those juices that escape don't bleed under the other ones and hasten their demise. Also do keep them away from bananas which secrete a chemical which speeds up ripening. On the other hand if you've ended up with under-ripe or green tomatoes, pop a banana next to them or better yet put them in a paper bag with a banana and they'll ripen up in a few days.
So all of that said, yes they taste the best if you have them on the counter but this is the real world and life is busy. If you've already got ripe tomatoes that you're not going to get through in time the fridge can buy you an extra few days and taste. If you do keep them in the fridge then it's better to let them come back to room temperature before you use them which helps some of the flavour come back.
When you're buying tomatoes, try to go for tomatoes that are smooth skinned and feel heavy for their size. Avoid ones with cracks or squishy spots because they're not going to last long. Don’t store them in air-tight containers because they're quite prone to mould. So use an open container or if you have to put them in something with a lid for meal prep purposes, say, then pop a sheet of kitchen paper in with them to mop up any moisture.
One of the easiest ways to stretch the shelf life a bit is to just check them daily and pick out any that are starting to go soft. Tomatoes release a natural gas called ethylene, which speeds up ripening. So if one of them starts to go over, it'll encourage the other ones to follow. So if you take that dodgy one away, it'll stop it turning the rest.
If you've got a few tomatoes starting to go over ripe but they're not mouldy, they're still perfectly good for cooking and will be full of flavour. So here's some ideas for rescuing tomatoes.
Tomatoes are great in soup if you've got a lot to use up. Gazpacho is obviously the most famous tomato soup apart from Heinz tinned soup. But they also pair brilliantly with red lentils and red curry paste for a sort of Thai-ish vibe. I'll put a recipe in the show notes that can be used with either cooked fresh ones or tinned ones. You can also use them up in a spur of the moment pasta sauce.
I will link to a recipe on my website which gets children to squeeze them with their hands to make a sauce and that's a lot of fun and it builds familiarity too. But for a quick cooked sauce to stash in the fridge you can just chop them up roughly, add a bit of olive oil, some garlic if you like, salt and pepper and cook them down gently in a pan until they break down into a sauce. Another good way to tackle a lot is to pop them on an oven tray with some garlic and onions if you like and some olive oil and roast them. That really concentrates the flavour and then you can then make it into a sauce.
Either way, a sauce like this will keep in the fridge for about four-ish days and that's ready to add to pasta or rice, or it's great spread on toast to pretend you're the kind of person who eats bruschetta on a weekday, or you can of course freeze the sauce too.
And talking of freezing, you can also absolutely freeze both raw and cooked tomatoes. I had our regular monthly chat with the lovely Kate Hall from The Full Freezer about how to freeze tomatoes and we'll hear that interview now.
Joanne Roach (05:22)
So we've got Kate here, freezer geek back to talk to us about our foods of month and how to make the most of them with their freezer. So Kate, July's all about tomatoes ,how can we freeze tomatoes in all their different forms?
Kate Hall (05:34)
So tomatoes are another lovely easy one. So starting with the smallest cherry tomatoes, I would literally just slice in half. And I like to slice them in half because I find that if I want to cook using them, I can just chuck them into the pan still frozen and they will cook through a lot faster and break down a lot quicker. So I find it really important to cut them in half.
If you had such just some standard small tomatoes, then cutting them either into halves or into quarters, definitely advisable for the same reason. Some people as well with larger tomatoes will peel them. I really feel like it's very much just a preference thing, you know, you do find that when you cook with them from frozen, the peel will break off in the pan and it will be in your dish in kind of little bits and pieces. But personally, I would much rather just eat it than sit there peeling tomatoes. So I'm all about the ease.
And if you've got a lot, if you wanted to make them into something, if you wanted to cook them up and make a sauce or anything, obviously you could absolutely do that and freeze the sauce as it is. What you would just need to bear in mind with that is that you want to be cooling the sauce down relatively quickly. within sort of an hour to two hours max and getting that into the fridge or the freezer so that you're not allowing any time for any harmful bacteria to grow. A lot of the time people sort of assume that harmful bacteria is only a meat thing and it's not, you can absolutely get sick from vegetables not being looked after properly too. So really important, cool it down quickly. And when you use those tomatoes from the freezer, that you reheat fully and that if you've already cooked them that you only reheat them once. So you shouldn't, you you should always freeze in portions that you can use it in all in one go.
What I would say as well is just to flag up. It's obviously implied from what I've already said, but you can't use them in a salad. So once they are frozen, it's not gonna work. It's no good. So it is definitely something that I would only freeze them at the point that you know, you're not gonna use them fresh. They're gonna end up in the bin. Do freeze them as fresh as possible because obviously the sooner you freeze them, more nutrients you retain and the better the quality when you actually cook with them. But even if they're starting to go a little bit, if you've left it right to the edge, as long as there's no mold, absolutely fine.
And as well, even if you have say some tin tomatoes and used half a tin, freeze the other half. I pop them in a freezer bag, can pop them in a tub or something, but for speed and convenience and organization as well, like it takes up very little space. You can pop them, I use compostable freezer bags and that just allows me to, yeah, freeze them nice and flat in the freezer and then I've got my sort of almost like a little filing cabinet of various different things that are frozen in that way. And when I want to cook with them, I can grab it out and literally just run it under a cold tap to break it out of the bag and use it from frozen or I can pop it in a dish of cold water and it'll be defrosted in sort of 10, 15, 20 minutes, depending on the size of the bag.
And if anybody wants to see, you know, see a video, I've obviously talked through a few different things there. I do have some videos on my Can I Freeze It? which kind of take you through these various steps and give you the ideas of how can you use it and a bit more information about, you know, storage times and how to go about doing it all.
Joanne Roach (09:08)
Thanks, Kate.
Kate Hall (09:09)
My pleasure. Thanks, Joe.
Joanne Roach (09:15)
So that's your freezer options, but for those of you who haven't got that much freezer space or you've already got some frozen or you want something different, if you've got a good haul of homegrown tomatoes or you spotted a tray for cheap at the market at the end of working day, drying is also a nice option if you have a dehydrator Or even a low oven. The trick is to cut fairly thin slices so they dry out before they have chance to go mouldy.
If you want you can sprinkle some salt and pepper on them before drying or a little oil and some oregano but I honestly always just dry them as they are because then they're more flexible when you use them later. I dry them until they're kind of rubbery, no more fleshy parts left at all but not until they're totally crisp although you can also definitely do that. I pop them in jars with some kitchen paper to catch any last bits of moisture and I leave them with the lid slightly open for a couple of weeks to make sure everything is totally dry before closing up the jars.
They keep for a good 1-2 years and they taste amazing, just like a sun-dried tomato, really concentrated. I honestly like them as a snack right from the jar, but you can also rehydrate them with hot water or chop them into things in the same way you would with a sun-dried tomato. I often add them into stews and they rehydrate in the cooking liquid. They're real favourite in our house, so although it's a bit niche to dehydrate them, I thought I would mention it.
But then back to the normal kind of non-homesteady world. The main thing with fresh tomatoes, like most things, is to keep an eye on them. Tomatoes usually give you bit of warning. They start to go soft or they wrinkle before they go bad. So it's easier to catch them in time for a quick sauce. And don't forget that out of season, tinned tomatoes are a great bet as they are canned at the ripest and are still filled with tomatoey goodness. One of the compounds in tomatoes that's really good for us, which is an antioxidant called lycopene, is increased by cooking so although by cooking it you lose bit of vitamin c versus raw you gain more lycopene. So that’s why it's really good to eat fruit and veg in a variety of different ways because you get different things from them prepared in different ways and they're kind of more than the sum of their parts and tinned tomatoes and tomato puree can play a good role in your well-being as well as the fresh ones.
So that's my roundup on using tomatoes. I'll pop some links to Kate's videos on freezing tomatoes in the show notes along with a couple of the recipes that I mentioned. I'll see you on Thursday for the last episode of July, can you believe it? And in the meantime, happy eating!
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