Food52 Genius
Why Are We Throwing Away the Best Parts of the Tomato?
In Kristen Miglore’s final Genius Recipes column, two simple, wildly tomatoey summer dinners (and just a little culinary school side-eye).
There may be perfectly good reasons for coring or seeding or peeling a tomato—sometimes.
Maybe you want a supersmooth sauce. Maybe that unpredictable pool of juice could throw off the ratio in your nkrakra or pudding. Maybe you’re in French culinary school and it’s tomato concassé day (when you’ll learn to strip away everything but small cubes of flesh—and then form your own opinions).
But, for anyone who appreciates a bursting BLT, or the pop of a whole cherry baby crushed like a gum ball—doesn’t throwing any tomato away feel like a missed opportunity?
This was the tension I felt on my own concassé day, as we scored the bottoms of plum tomatoes with a small “X” and cut out their dry scars, dunked them into boiling water and then an icy bath, peeled back their skins, ejected their seeds and juice, and threw away everything that wasn’t a cube. Why aren’t we just eating all of this?
Over a decade later, as I was hunting for easy, welcoming recipes for the Simply Genius cookbook, there it was again, tomato concassé, my old frenemy, still taught as an essential technique in some beginner cookbooks.
It may be cooking school canon; it may be useful to a certain strain of classical haute cuisine; but by this point in my career, I felt assured: When learning to cook, concassé is not essential.
And then I stumbled on the Rice Pancakes with Ham & Tomato-Basil Sauce in And Still I Cook, by Leah Chase, the late, longtime chef of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans. It sounded like a vibrant, comforting summer dinner, and it called for “2 cups chopped ripe fresh tomatoes,” emphatically “with seeds.”
With this subtle but direct instruction, Chase’s recipe from 2003 fit right into not only our modern (and timeless) resistance to food waste, but our growing attraction to texture swings and crunchy and saucy garnishes. Except, instead of making them separately or buying them ready to swoosh and scatter, here she found them all in one place: a ripe tomato—from taut skin to the puddle of seeds—largely left to be.
She warmed the chopped—and only chopped—tomatoes just enough to soften them, with butter-sizzled ham, scallions, fresh basil, and garlic salt, then spooned the sauce over crispy pancakes plumped with leftover white rice. When I make it, no part of me wonders What’s this peel doing here?
For my own riff, for this, my last Genius column, I tested my assumption that Chase’s pancake template could accommodate whatever flour and leftover grains and beans we might have on hand (yep). I also wanted to see if her crisp-edged cakes could be just as thrilling in a gluten-free and vegan outfit (yep). All I had to do was swap in rice flour, baking powder, and salt for the self-rising flour, and a mix of cooked brown rice and chickpeas for the white rice. Chase had done the rest.
My sauce on top is just juicy tomatoes, which is what my family calls our other favorite way to eat the whole beast: ripe, sliced, salted, and drizzled with olive oil, then left for a few minutes to make their own dressing. Chunkily torn herbs optional. I hope the Queen of Creole Cuisine would have approved.
Her recipe holds exactly the sorts of cooking details I’ve obsessed over and celebrated in 12 years of gathering Genius Recipes for—and very much with—all of you. The treasures tucked in decades-old cookbooks, or the new ones breaking ground. The questioning of what’s classically taught or widely assumed. The shortcuts that make us feel smarter and the meals that we’ll talk about, maybe forever.
I’ll never stop returning to the collection we’ve amassed on Food52 and in three Genius cookbooks, and I’ll never stop wanting to hear about your genius finds—you can find me on Instagram @miglorious. Thank you for cooking with me.
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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