It’s here again, tomato season. As we established in our tomato-butter sauce post, you’re best off eating tomatoes one of two ways:

1. Fresh when in season
2. Preserved when not in season

The sauce is one way to lock in their flavor, cooked down and frozen for later use: a bowl of fresh pappardelle in February.

My favorite method, though, is oven-drying tomatoes and storing them in olive oil.

Here’s the short-and-sweet recipe:

Ingredients

• Fresh plum tomatoes
• Salt
• Olive oil

Directions

Pre-heat your oven to 200ºF.

Wash the tomatoes, remove the stems, and core out the stem piece at the top. Slice them in half and remove all seeds, water, and jelly-like insides; reduce them to just the meaty pieces. Drain well.

Line a large baking tray (with sides) with at least 1/4” of salt. Place the tomatoes on the salt bed, skin side down.

Slow-dry on the medium rack for about six hours, until slightly leathery. Store in jars in olive oil, refrigerated.

Use as a substitute for watery, flavorless, out-of-season tomatoes on sandwiches, in sauces, or as a winning antipasto.

Notes

If possible, use plum tomatoes - the long, pear-shaped ones. This is the best tomato to use for sauces, and it works best here as well. Varieties include Roma and San Marzano. Most other tomatoes should work, as long as they’re good - save heirlooms for sandwiches, though. (Oh and, while I’m a fan of canned tomatoes, don’t use them for this - they’re far too juicy and soft.)

Don’t splurge on the olive oil here. It should taste clean, but not too assertive. You’ll want the tomato flavor to shine, so go with a decent, cheap brand of oil.

When seeding tomatoes, work in a colander set over a large bowl. This way you’ll get to save all the delicious tomato water - a beverage that puts “tomato juice” (pureed tomatoes diluted with water) to absolute shame.

Make sure your jars are perfectly clean and the lids close snuggly. Cover the tomatoes with oil completely. This is the secret to preserving things in oil: start clean and make sure nothing is exposed to air. The oil will do the rest. The tomatoes will keep for months in the fridge, or a week or two unrefrigerated. What may happen in the fridge is, the jar will get cloudy as the oil congeals. This is perfectly natural and does not affect the taste of the oil or the tomatoes in any way; you can thaw out the jar in a bowl of hot water and refrigerate again over and over.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that oven-dried tomatoes are approximately 500 times tastier than most fresh tomatoes. Here they are in action, topping a sandwich of chicken salad made with fish-sauce fried wings and kewpie mayo.

The clock is ticking - run to the market and grab all the tomatoes you can!

“Last week for cherries!” the fella at last weekend’s farmer’s market crowed, and I knew I had to do something. I ended up taking home six pounds of the last of the season’s Rainier and Bing cherries.

Here in Washington, we grow more sweet cherries than just about any place else. When I first moved up here, these things flummoxed me — they weren’t tart like the cherries I knew back east. And these white things that look kinda like over-ripened crabapples? You guys think they’re so special you named ‘em after the big mountain off in the distance?

Turns out Rainier cherries are worth moving to the west coast for. They’re pretty fragile as far as cherries go, more suspectible to big temperature swings, and farmers tend to lose a lot of fruit to birds. This makes them pretty spendy, even close to the orchards¹. At the start of the season, I’ll see Rainiers go for something like $5 a pound. When they hit their peak towards the end of July through early August, they’re a little cheaper. All of which is to say: these are premium fruits worth hanging on to for as long as you can as the season ends.

As luck would have it, it’s pretty easy to preserve cherries in syrup and alcohol — our friends at American Drink have a great primer on just that. I took my pal Albert’s advice and did a bit of experimenting. Here’s what I came up with.

Ingredients

• 2lbs of cherries - Bing, Van, Rainier, go nuts
• 1 cup of water
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of alcohol of your choice (rum, brandy, various liquers, bourbon, wine)
• A few clean, wide mouth jars with new lids

When you’re picking a liquor, have fun, but keep it straightforward. Brandies and other distilled wines make a good choice. I matched bourbon with both Rainiers and Bings and they came out great. You could even do a white or a rosé wine with Rainiers to match their light color.

You’re probably going to want to invest in a cherry pitter because pitting more than a couple of cherries with a paring knife or screwdriver (seriously) is a pain in the ass. I like this one from Oxo.

Make sure your jars are clean. I like to run them through the diswasher without soap or boil for about 10 minutes, just to make sure.

De-stem, wash and pit your cherries. This will take a while. SAVE THE PITS. Seriously.

Add the cherry pits and the water to a pot and bring to a boil. The seeds will add some color and flavor to the syrup. You could add other flavors at this point — a cinnamon stick, lemon or orange zest, a vanilla bean, peppercorns — but go easy.

Once the water’s boiling, add the sugar, stir to dissolve, and leave on the heat only long enough to make sure all the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pot from the heat, then add your booze.

A word about the liquor here: you’re going to need to determine on your own how boozy you want these cherries to be. A full cup should do the trick; I wouldn’t recommend more than that. You can boil off some or all of the alcohol if you just want the flavor without the hooch. And you can skip the alcohol all together. You might need to double the amount of syrup you make.

Fill your jar with as many cherries as you can — I found it was best to do a few at a time so I didn’t end up with big gaps. Pour the syrup over the cherries, then let them cool to room temperature then refrigerate. They should last a few months in the fridge.

The obvious use for these is as cocktail cherries and I won’t stand in your way there. Spoon a few with a little syrup over a scoop of icecream to bring a little summer flavor back into fall.

1. Rumor has it that in Japan, where people tend to be rather perfectionist about their produce, Rainier cherries sell for as much as a dollar a piece. ↩

Chances are, you or someone near to you — a neighbor or a coworker, perhaps — has a garden full of yellow and green zucchini, the never-ending summer squash. And by now, you might be a bit tired of zucchini bread and grilled rings of squash that kind of turn to mush after five minutes.

One of my favorite ways to quickly cook these oft-maligned veggies is to turn them into a faux pasta, which requires little more than a vegetable peeler and a pot of water.

The idea is simple — peel the squash lengthwise to create ribbons of that resemble a wide fettuccine or pappardelle. Blanch them quickly then add a few accompaniments for flavor. Easy, right?

Ingredients

• A mixture of green zucchini and yellow summer squash, about one of each per person
• Thinly sliced shallot, about 1/4 per person (you could sub onion or sliced garlic here)
• Cherry tomatoes, halved¹, I like to use a mix of cherry, grape, sungolds
• Some olive oil
• Freshly grated parmesan cheese

First things first, set a big pot of water to boil. While that’s going, set a small to medium frying pan on low to medium-low. Add a slick of olive oil to the pan, not much, and let it heat up for just a minute. Don’t let the oil get too hot or it will develop an off taste.

Add the sliced shallots to the oil in the frying pan to soften them a bit. The temperature should be low enough that they shouldn’t brown at all, only slightly simmer.

Now, peel your squash, lengthwise. You can usually get a few strips before you start to hit the seeds, at that point, rotate the vegetable and keep going until you’ve got a pile of squash ribbons. I haven’t found much use for the center core and usually just compost it.

The water should be at a full boil at this point. Add a few tablespoons of sea or kosher salt, let it come back to boil, then add a handful of the squash ribbons. Don’t overcrowd the pot, it’s ok to work in batches here. After one minute, the squash will be ready, fish them out with a set of tongs and let them drain in a colander while you work through the rest of the ribbons. Don’t let them overcook, you want to get them to be soft but not mushy — al dente.

When the squash are all done, add a serving’s worth to the frying pan with the oil and shallots, then toss just enough to coat in the oil. Add a healthy amount of parmesan cheese, then turn again to melt the cheese, then move the pasta to a bowl for serving. Again, it’s best to work in batches here.

Before serving, add a handful of the tomato halves, season with a three-finger pinch of grey or kosher salt and a few turns of the pepper mill. I’ll even throw in some prosciutto if I’ve got some.

If you’re looking to capture the end of the summer in a bowl, fresh and crisp, this should do the trick.

Confit is a fancy food-word. If you’re eating confit, there’s probably Salad Périgourdine and beurre blanc on the plate, and a Côtes du Rhône or something on the table. And sure, confit is a high-point of fancy cooking, but its roots are humble. If European farmers could invent it and then use it for centuries, we fancy, modern people can use it in the fancy-free dishes we make in our fancy, modern kitchens. Let’s demystify!

The most traditional confit you’re likely to encounter today is duck confit; duck leg, fully submerged in duck fat, cooked at very low heat. This lack of air exposure and a constant, low heat assure that the meat won’t dry out or overcook - it will just get softer and tastier. Confit meats are the very definition of the word tender.

This process can be applied to many other foods. Just keep these two guidelines in mind:

1. Fully cover the food with fat (duck fat, olive oil, grapeseed oil, bacon fat…)
2. Cook at low heat for a long time (no higher than 250ºF, 2-10 hours)

A person of French heritage may grumble about this, but in my book, you’ll be justified calling any food made in this way a confit. Jim will write more about that duck confit I mentioned; for now, let’s look at vegetables, currently at their peak here in the Pacific Northwest.

Cherry Tomato Confit

Compared to their full-sized relatives, cherry tomatoes have an advantageous ratio of meat to juice. Slow-cooking a whole San Marzano tomato would produce a tasty bite, but it would ooze water. Cherry tomatoes just pop a little.

Find a market stand with bright, firm, sweet cherry tomatoes of whatever color appeals to you. Set aside any bruised, cracked, or otherwise compromised tomatoes for another use (such as immediate snacking). Remove the stems, wash the tomatoes well, then dry them thoroughly by tumbling gently in a clean kitchen towel.

Place them in a solid pot large enough so your tomatoes cover the whole bottom, but not in more than 2 or 3 layers. Sprinkle some salt over them - as much as you’d season fresh tomatoes with - then cover with enough cheap-and-clean olive oil to top every last tomato; any bits left sticking out will dry out. 

Set the stove to medium heat for a minute or two (to speed up the initial heating process), then turn it down to low. Keep it there for about two hours, adjusting the heat so you get some tiny bubbles at the bottom of the pot, but the surface isn’t moving. Steady, quiet heat is what you’re after. 

Side note: meat confit is usually done in the oven, where heat is gentler and more even. It’s a shame to fire up the whole oven for a  small amount of vegetables, however, and the stovetop works fine. If you decide to make a huge batch in the oven, set the heat to 200ºF.

You’ll know the tomatoes are done when they’re slightly shriveled, the skin on some has lightly cracked, and they’re soft and juicy. (Don’t forget to let them cool a bit before you taste them. An important lesson it’s taken me many years to learn: oil can be furiously hot even when it looks perfectly still.)

Once it’s cooled down to room temp, store your tomato confit in a clean, tightly-sealing jar, making sure once again that the oil covers everything fully. It will keep in the fridge for months, improving your sandwiches and salads all winter long.

Garlic Confit

Garlic loves olive oil, and olive oil loves garlic. If the day ever comes when I have to name one flaw of garlic (and I hope that day never comes) I’d say that its flavor often lives in the shadow of its pungent power. The good news is, you can mellow garlic out quite a bit by cooking it over - you guessed it - low heat, for a long time.

Same basic principle as the cherry tomatoes: clean your garlic cloves, salt them a bit, cover with oil, cook on low heat for a few hours. You can turn up the heat a bit here, to maybe 1.5 or 2 out of 10, since garlic is pretty sturdy. A slightly shimmering oil is fine, as long as you stir now and then to make sure the bottoms of your cloves aren’t burning.

The garlic confit is done when it’s soft enough to mash with a fork. Store in its oil. (See note below.) Use in pasta dishes, on pizza, in rice bowls, as a robust side for roast chicken.

You know how I said olive oil loves garlic? Don’t dream of throwing out the oil once you eat your way through the veggies stored in it. People pay good money for flavored oils. Since introducing any additional foodstuffs into oil will shorten its shelf-life, keep it in the fridge. But, feel free to use it for cooking (where purity isn’t a must-have), salads, further confiting, etc.

UPDATE: A reader notes that garlic, due to its low acidity, is at risk for developing botulism when stored in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment. Commercially packaged garlic stored in oil is treated with acid first. To minimize your botulism risk, store the garlic separate from the oil and use it within a few weeks.

Bonus recipes: pearl onion confit and leek confit

Now that you have the general idea, try playing with it: confit some fresh (not frozen) pearl onions. Hint: peel them first.

Feel free to experiments with different kinds of oil or fat. Since the heat will be low, you can safely use butter, for instance. Leek confit calls for thinly sliced (up to 1/4”), lightly salted leeks cooked in butter, with the optional addition of a bit of water. If you’re after a texture closer to onion soubise, a rich and sweet marmalade, don’t cover the leeks completely. Just stir now and then, making sure they’re slowly cooking but never burning. Spread on toasted bread immediately, fold into eggs, or store in fat. 

Like so many cooking methods, confit was originally a preservation method, child to necessity. Even in 2011, there’s nothing wrong with preserving in-season foods, especially when the preservation method transforms them into softer, sweeter, fancier versions of themselves.

Growing up in Croatia and Bosnia, I ate a heck of a lot of kajmak (say it fast: kai-muck). Gallons and gallons of this rich, fatty, savory, goes-with-anything cream at the intersection of milk and cheese. It’s the region’s cream cheese, mayo, and ketchup all in one. I can’t think of a widely available US product that would serve as a workable substitute,  so here’s a recipe for making your own.

Ethnic authenticity note: from town to town, from street to street, from family to family in Croatia, folks will prefer creamier versions to thicker, cheesier ones - and vice versa. This is the easiest version to make at home, and luckily, it’s my favorite.

You will need:

• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 tsp salt

That’s all, seriously. I would strongly recommend using the highest-quality milk and cream you can find: if it’s from a neighbor or a nearby farm, 5 points; if it comes in a glass bottle, 3 points; if it’s at the very least local and fresh, have a point. This will affect the tastiness of the final product, but it’s also not a bad idea for the purposes of food safety. Speaking of which, keep your pots very clean in the next step. Cool?

This recipe is best started in the evening. It’ll be edible in 36 hours or so. We’ll be heating the dairy in a double boiler; bain-marie in French, if you wish to impress your friends. Start with a large, wide pot filled about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way with water, then in the middle of it place a smaller pot - also wide, if possible. The idea is to heat the inner pot with the indirect heat of the water, which will prevent our milk from scorching. Make sure the inner pot is stable. If it has handles, hang them off the sides of the larger pot; if not, you could put a metal cookie cutter under the inner pot, thus lifting it off the bottom. (Obviously, don’t use anything metal to support a pot inside an enameled pot, as shown here.)

Add enough water to the outer pot to run up half way up the sides of the inner pot. With the smaller pot thus surrounded with water, pour the milk into it and set your heat to high until the water is at a light boil. Don’t let it roll violently or boil over. Stir the milk until it’s at something like a simmer, adjusting the heat as needed. The milk should be steamy and ever-so-slightly bubbly; anything harsher than that is too hot.

Pour in the cream and the salt and stir. Bring the milk up to a steamy simmer again, then turn the heat down to medium-low and keep it there for 90 minutes. Don’t stir past this point, no matter how tempted you are; we want to let the cream form on top.

After the 90 minutes, turn off the heat and leave everything as is overnight. No fridge, no moving, no stirring. You can cover the smaller pot after a few hours, but you’ll want to let the milk slowly evaporate for a while.

In the morning, set the stove to medium heat and warm everything up for 15 minutes or so, then turn it down to medium-low and keep it there for 30 minutes. You can now move the smaller pot to a cooling rack and bring it to room temperature, then cover it and move it to the fridge. Still no stirring!

The following morning, check how much kajmak has formed in the pot. If you’re lucky, almost all of it is now a dense substance the consistency of cream cheese. There could also be milk half an inch below the surface - if that’s the case, carefully skim the cheese from the surface, cutting around the edge of the pot with a knife to make sure you get all the cheesy goodness. Strain any pieces that break off and combine all the solid, curdy, or thick-and-creamy parts. Leave behind any milk or cream at the bottom of the pot.

With all the kajmak now in a fresh container, stir it with a fork to even it out. It may still be a bit chunky or curdy; this doesn’t bother me a bit. Taste and add salt if needed. It will thicken and smooth out if you leave it in the fridge a bit longer. 

What to do with it? Oh boy, oh boy… Dollop it on savory pies, dip freshly fried fry-bread in it, spread it on bagels, pair it with raw onion if you’re tough enough to handle it. The cooling richness of kajmak pairs great with grilled meats; you should really be using it instead of sour cream in our Slavonian Burger recipe.

Here it is, topping a messy slice of Americanized burek. Could’ve fooled you into thinking it was ice cream, huh?

This recipe is inspired by the extremely satisfying “808 fried chicken” at Portland’s 808 Grinds Hawaiian cart. Theirs is better because it’s battered and they serve it with the best mac salad in town, but mine is healthier (probably?) Cucumbers instead of mac salad - I mean, come on. Scroll down for a photo or trust me and read on.

You will need:

• 4 chicken thighs, boneless + skinless
• 1/2 cup usukuchi (light soy sauce; not “Lite soy sauce” or the low-sodium kinds.)
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tsp freshly grated ginger
• 2 tsp sugar
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed (but kept whole)
• Peanut oil and canola oil
• 2 cups sweet rice flour or cornstarch

• 1 cup Japanese rice (short grain, sometimes called “sushi rice”)

• 1 cucumber
• white wine vinegar
• sake, if you’ve got any

For a few of these things, you might need to make a run to your friendly neighborhood Asian market. No, really, some of the best foods you’ve never had are right there. In addition to the above ingredients, pick up some:

• Nanami togarashi - a salty, spicy seasoning of chili and orange peel. It’s like salt, but better.
• Kewpie mayo - the best mayo you didn’t make yourself. The one in the big squeezy bottle with the baby on it.

Who knows, maybe we’ll use these in another Salt & Fat recipe! I’m on a minor Asian kick right now.

Let’s start by making Japanese rice. (This is the generic Japanese method; a great thing to know.) Place your rice in a stock pot or a bowl and rinse it under running water, stirring it around with your hand. Drain the water 2-3 times, until it’s no longer milky. This gets rid of extra starch which would make your rice sticky and shapeless; Japanese rice is served with the grains perfectly outlined.

Drain the rice in a sieve for a few minutes while you prep the chicken. Then, place the rice back in the pot you’ll cook it in and add 1 cup and 1 tablespoon of water. The equation is, about 1.1 parts water to 1 part rice. Let the rice soak for a while; the longer, the better (up to a few hours.) To start cooking, bring it to a near-boil, then cover and turn the heat down to low. Keep it there for about 10-15 minutes or until the water is fully absorbed. Now, they always tell you not to peek, but you’re pretty much going to have to - how else would you know if it’s done? Just do it infrequently and quickly.

Take the rice off the heat and replace the lid with a clean towel. This will steam the rice further; you can keep it here for 10 minutes to an hour, however long it takes you to fry the chicken. Fluff it gently with a flat spatula and it’s ready for the bowl.

About an hour before you’re ready to fry, marinade the chicken. Start by cleaning up the chicken pieces - trim away any loose or large pieces of fat. These are tasty, but save them for another use. (No, really - I freeze mine, adding to the collection as I go, then fry them separately, as a topping.) Cut the chicken into 2-3” pieces, trying to keep them even. Mix the soy sauces, the ginger, sugar, and garlic in a bowl, then toss in the chicken. Grind in some black pepper if you like. Move the whole thing to a large zipper bag and close, removing as much air from the bag as you can. Refrigerate for half an hour (if you’re in a hurry) up to, say, 4 hours.

So, we’ll be deep-frying. Deep-frying at home kind of terrifies me. Or, it used to. Let me give you some tips, earned by oil burns on my hands and a lot of stovetop clean-up:

• Use a good candy thermometer. What’s a good one? Honestly, I’ve never been super-impressed with any, but find one that’s rated up to at least 400ºF and has a clip. Set it up so the tip is near the side, but not touching anything.
• Get the oil as close to 375ºF as you can when you start, resulting in the final temperature of about 325ºF. (Cold food will drop the temprature of the oil.) Any hotter, and it’ll boil violently; any cooler, and you’ll be eating soggy, greasy food.
• Keep your friables very, very, very dry. Splatter is usually caused by cold water hitting hot oil. This is why we coat things in breading, by the way.
• Use a splatter screen when possible. It does other things, too!

Heat a lot of oil - 4” at least - in a very big, deep pot, with the candy thermometer all set up. (Why “candy” thermometer? Candy is made at frighteningly high temperatures.) It’ll take a few minutes to reach 375, during which we’ll prep the chicken further. Remove the chicken pieces from the bag, reserving the marinade, and place them on a big plate lined with lots of paper towels. Pat the chicken dry; completely dry, please.

(If you hate to throw out that juicy marinade, bring it to a simmer in a saucepan, turn the heat down to low, and reduce to a glossy, thickened sauce.)

Next, pour the sweet rice flour into a wide, shallow pan. Grab the chicken pieces with tongs or a fork and press them gently into the flour on all sides until it’s covered; shake off any unsightly clumps. Once they’re all floured up, let them rest for a few minutes while you make the sides.

Quick-pickle some cucumbers; slice them thin and toss them with the white-wine vinegar, the sake, sugar, and salt. Hit them with a dash of the nanami togarashi. Chill.

Back to the chicken - hopefully by now your thermometer is at 360 or so; good, now turn the heat to medium-high or whatever will keep it at 375. Note that the temperature will keep climbing after you first see 360 on the thermometer. If it climbs over 380, move the pot off the heat for a bit. Basically, do whatever you can to hit that magic number, 375. Just keep in mind that hot oil never looks as dangerous as it really is; be careful.

Don’t worry, though, this will be a walk in the park. One by one, tong the chicken pieces into the oil, making sure they produce that satisfying tssssss sound. Do not cover the pot - this will trap moisture, resulting in more splatter. If some oil drops do jump out at you, grab that splatter screen; just make sure you don’t knock off the thermometer with it. You should notice a temperature drop when the cold chicken enters the pot - down to 325 or so - and that’s just what we want. Fry the chicken, mostly undisturbed, for about 10 minutes. (Work in batches if needed.) The finished chicken should look golden and irresistible. If you’re unsure, pull out a piece and check it - it should be done, with no sign of pink, but still juicy and springy.

Using tongs or a spider skimmer, remove the chicken from the pot and dry it on a wire rack placed over a large pan. If you don’t have a wire rack, line the pan with crumpled paper towels. Whatever you do, don’t just put freshly fried food on flat paper; it’ll end up sitting in its own grease. Let the chicken rest for a couple of minutes while you serve the rice, drain the cucumbers, and clean up the kitchen a little. (Watch out for those hot pots and utensils!)

If you made the marinade into a sauce, toss the chicken with it. If not, hey, still tasty!

Here’s how I served mine:

(Sorry about the Instagram filter; trust me, the photo looked worse before. Next time we design a kitchen, we’re putting in bright, even, shadow-free lighting everywhere.)

The chicken was hit with a deconstructed version (lol) of the Perfect Condiment: kewpie mayo and sriracha. That pink stuff at the sushi bar? That’s it.

This is chopstick-friendly food, so ditch the fork. Healthy! Maybe!