Turning Busted Tomatoes into Tomato Water
Late-summer tomatoes, often bruised and battered, hold a secret well of great beauty and value. According to a blog post on Defector, making tomato water is the purest expression of a tomato, all heart and no husk.
Tomato water is an excellent way to sneak umami into salad dressings and sauces and negronis. The water inside of a tomato is packed with glutamates, the building blocks of MSG, which stands for Making Stuff Good. The magic trick of tomato water is that it allows you to make things more savory without necessarily making them salty.
The blog post suggests buying a case of gin every other year to store tomato water-augmented bottles in the freezer for the Lean Times. However, tomato water can also be used in a Mexican lager, splashed into a vinaigrette, or stirred into a pitcher of lemonade.
To make tomato water, you will need a pound of late-summer tomatoes, the uglier the better. Ideally, you want slicing tomatoes or even cherry tomatoes, which have a higher water content than "paste tomatoes" like Romas or San Marzanos. However, if Romas are all you have, you can still siphon off their useful fluids.
You will also need a blender, a fine-mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth, and a medium-sized bowl. Cut off any truly disgusting bits of the tomatoes with a knife, but don't worry about trimming them too neatly. Then, blend the tomatoes for about 10 seconds, until you have a coarse puree.
Pour the puree into a cheesecloth-lined strainer set over a bowl and let it drain for a couple of hours. The tomato pulp will take about 3 hours to drain, and you should have about 10 ounces of sunset-tinged liquid MSG.
The blog post also includes a recipe for a Tomato Water Martini, which consists of 2¼ ounces of gin, ¾ ounces of dry vermouth, and ¾ ounces of tomato water. Stir everything together in a mixing glass or shaker tin over a lot of ice until it is colder than your attitude toward vermouth-haters. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with cherry tomatoes or olives on a frilly little toothpick.
In addition to making tomato water, the blog post also suggests dehydrating and pulverizing the tomato pulp into a ruby-red tomato powder, a versatile and appealing spice. This can be done by glopping the drained tomato pulp onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and dehydrating it in an oven set to its lowest possible temp. Once the pulp is desiccated but unburnt, remove it from the oven and transfer it to a spice grinder. Pulse until it forms a fine powder.
The blog post concludes by saying that you can say umami as many times as you want, and that you are like Ma Ingalls, drying corn for the prairie cellar.
