Soaking a fruit or a vegetable in pickling lime or Calcium Hydroxide is a theme in the Mugaritz book. Soaking any vegetable in a mixture of water and pickling lime binds the cellulose and makes the fruit firm. The longer it is soaked the harder a shell it forms. The reason pickling lime is sold is -as the name suggest- keep those bread and butter pickles from getting mushy in the pickling liquid. Vegetables soaked in lime can withstand a good bit of cooking while remaining firm and never turning mushy. Chef Aduriz uses it in many recipes from making “calcified” branches of salsify to the traditional candied pumpkin cubes. The flavors here are very familiar. We have tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and herbs but the texture and look are certainly not what your typical tomato salad is like.
I blanched the tomatoes and peeled them first. I then soaked them in a mixture of water and pickling lime for several hours. The lime has a tendency to settle, so I needed to stir it every so often. By the end of the soaking time you could feel how firm and rough the tomatoes are on the outside. Next step is to cook them in a mixture of sugar and water.
After the tomatoes are cooked they get hollowed out from and all the soft pulp is removed. It’s pretty cool to see how the inside is still all soft and pulpy but the entire outside is basically a tomato shell with the texture of a soft-ish apple. It really could be battered and fried at this point and it would not fall apart. We do not fry it though. Instead the tomato shells go in a very low oven to dry for several hours. By the end of the drying time the tomatoes are like giant hollow deep red raisins!
While the tomatoes were dehydrating I worked on the filling and the garlic. The filling is made from large beefsteak tomatoes. The recipe had some slightly vague instructions to roast the tomatoes over fresh coals. I decided to broil them and roast them instead to get some char on them and also get them very soft. When fully cooked I got rid of the seeds and mixed the tomato pulp with olive oil, salt, minced garlic to form a good emulsion.
To go with the tomato salad we have a whole boatload of slow roasted garlic cloves. This is just like it sounds. Gently roast garlic heads wrapped in foil in the oven until soft and deliciously sweet. I peeled them and tossed them with a good amount of olive oil.
To plate, I stuffed the tomato shells with the tomato emulsion mixture and “closed” each one with a reserved tomato stem. a bunch of garlic cloves go on the side along with a few small herbs. I whipped the dressing from olive oil, cider vinegar, white miso and parsley and drizzled it all over the salad. It goes without saying that the flavors are excellent together. The texture was terrific and new. The tomatoes were not like sun-dried tomatoes but had a nice soft chew to them that was very nice. I was worried that the syrup the tomatoes are cooked in would make them too sweet but that was not the case. The flavors were perfectly balanced with mild sweetness, acidity, very deep tomato flavor (from all the roasting, drying and concentrating) and fragrant garlic and herbs.
Looks great!