Salvage Operation

We had a hard freeze in Austin last weekend.  It was 24 degrees outside my house on Saturday morning.  I had moved all my potted plants to safety, but we did have tomato plants in the ground and they weren't so lucky.  When I went out to assess the damages, I found two big green tomatoes on one of the plants.  I didn't realize those were out there, and now they appeared to be frozen solid.  I went ahead and picked them and took them inside, figuring I'd end up throwing them away.

By mid afternoon those tomatoes had thawed, and to my surprise, they didn't turn to mush.  In fact cutting one open revealed that it was actually in pretty decent shape.  From what I could tell, only the outer 1/2 inch or so of flesh had really frozen, and even it was fine, perhaps a bit softer than the rest of the fruit.  I decided to try to make some sort of a preserve from the tomato.  I found an interesting recipe for tomato jam.  It called for several pounds of green tomatoes, but I was able to adjust the recipe down.

I diced the tomatoes, weighed them, then added an equal amount by weight, of sugar.  To that I added lemon zest, lemon juice, and half a stick of cinnamon.  I allowed the mixture to sit for a while to draw the juice out of the fruit, then cooked it over medium high heat until the fruit had turned translucent, and the mixture thickened.  I ended up taking the mixture a bit too far (probably to the soft ball stage), and I could see that if I had allowed it to cool, I would have wound up with a jar of green tomato taffy.  That might have been an interesting new confection, but it wasn't really what I was going for.   I could have cooked it some more to try to make green tomato Jolly Ranchers, but instead I added another several tablespoons of lemon juice to thin it out and hoped for the best.

Once it cooled, it ended up a bit stiffer than I'd like, but not unreasonably so, it looks beautiful, and the flavor is great.  It goes great on a thin cracker with a bit of goat cheese.  Yummy.   Next time I find myself with an abundance of green tomatoes, I may have to make a bigger batch of this to give out as gifts.