Pickled Pink

Using up green tomatoes when summer’s over

The first summer we lived in Alaska, my wife Lin was in our local Carrs grocery store foraging for a salad tomato. We’d just moved here from Nevada where we’d been spoiled by the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables available from the lush farm regions just over the border in California. To this day, 37 years later, Lin remembers the shock of realizing there were no truly red tomatoes in the bins, only sad gray orbs, picked green, weary after their long journey from the Lower 48, and priced like jewels. A woman nearby, also trying to find a good one, saw her perplexed look and said, “No matter how long we stand here staring at these things, they’re not getting any redder.” In those days, our tossed salads were heavy on the cucumbers and light on tomatoes.

Now, several decades into the “high tunnel” or “hoop house” revolution in vegetable growing, Alaska boasts fantastic red ripe tomatoes in abundance each summer, and we’re happy to have them. We don’t garden on the industrial scale like many folks here in Homer, but we do have a small backyard greenhouse in which we grow six tomato plants. Between our own small harvest and a seemingly endless supply at the local farmers market, we have all the juicy red tomatoes we can eat.

One thing that has not changed in all those years is the length of our summers. They are still adamantly short. Both we, in our tiny personal garden, and the farmers in their gigantic high tunnels, grow far more tomatoes than can mature by late August and September, when the days shorten and the nights begin to chill. The result is a surfeit of green tomatoes. Enter the pickling days.

My wife loves canning, pickling, any kind of food preserving. Over the years, I’ve seen Lin pickle everything but our cats. For green tomatoes, she likes an Italian recipe from the wonderful book Preserving Italy by Domenica Marchetti. It’s extremely simple, and relatively quick work. The finished green slices are fantastic alongside a panini or a salami sandwich (anytime you want something a little more Italian than dill pickles). So, if you’re into homemade fermented foods, this is the way to end your summer.

Oh, man, this is making me hungry. I’m going to make a copacollo and salami sandwich on a homemade baguette, with fresh basil leaves drizzled with olive oil, and maybe a slice of provolone. And, of course, crisp green tomatoes on the side. There may be a glass of wine involved.