August Is for Tomatoes

There is a short window — and it really is short, maybe four weeks in this city — when tomatoes need nothing at all. No roasting, no reducing, no pinch of sugar to correct them, no long slow anything. Salt, oil, and twenty minutes on the counter.

Outside that window I cook them hard: long trays in a low oven, or down into a sauce with nothing but garlic and a great deal of patience. But in August, cooking a good tomato is a small act of vandalism. This is the month to do almost nothing and take the credit.

How to buy them

Weight first, smell second, colour a distant third. A good tomato is noticeably heavier than it looks — that is water and sugar and structure — and it smells green and sharp at the stem end. If you get nothing at the stem, you will get nothing on the plate.

The ugly ones are almost always better, and they are almost always cheaper, which remains one of the great free lunches in food shopping. Cracks across the shoulders mean the fruit grew fast after rain. Odd lobed shapes, scarring at the base, wildly uneven colour — none of that is a defect in flavour. Perfectly round, uniformly red, faintly shiny tomatoes have usually been bred to survive a lorry.

Buy more than you think you need. They keep for a few days on the counter and the failure mode of this plan is that you eat three tomatoes standing at the sink, which is not really a failure.

Never, under any circumstances, the fridge

Cold does two things to a tomato and both are bad. It flattens the aroma compounds within about an hour — and unlike most cold damage, that one does not fully reverse when it warms back up. It also turns the flesh mealy, because the cell walls break down differently at low temperature.

Counter, stem side down, out of direct sun. If you have cut one and genuinely cannot finish it, then fine, the fridge, cut side down on a plate — but bring it back to room temperature before it goes anywhere near a plate you are serving.

What to do with a good one

Slice it thick. Salt the slices and leave them for fifteen or twenty minutes before you do anything else. The salt draws a little liquid to the surface and seasons the flesh right through instead of sitting on top of it, and what pools on the plate is the best-tasting thing in the kitchen.

Then oil, and only then. Oil first makes a barrier and the salt never gets in. This is a two-minute reordering of the same three ingredients and it is the difference between a nice plate of tomatoes and one people go quiet over.

The liquid at the bottom of the plate is not a mess to be wiped up. It is the point. Put bread in it.

After that: panzanella, if you have stale bread, which is really just a way of turning that liquid into a meal. Tomatoes on toast rubbed with a cut garlic clove. Chopped raw and stirred through hot pasta with torn basil and enough oil that it emulsifies with the tomato water into something that behaves like a sauce without ever having been cooked.

What to do with a disappointing one

Roast it. Halved, cut side up, a very low oven, three or four hours. Under-ripe and out-of-season tomatoes have the acid and the structure but not the concentration, and time in a low oven fixes exactly that by driving off water and caramelising what is left.

Or make sauce, in which case buy tinned instead. Good tinned tomatoes were picked ripe and processed within hours, and in February they will beat anything sold fresh in this hemisphere. There is no shame in it and anyone who tells you otherwise is cooking for an audience rather than for dinner.

Putting the month away

If you get to the end of August with more than you can eat — and you should aim to — the easiest thing is a slow-roasted tray tipped into a jar and covered with oil. It keeps a couple of weeks in the fridge and it makes January considerably more bearable.

The rest of the year, I cook tomatoes. For these four weeks I mostly just slice them, and I have made peace with the fact that this is the best thing I will put on a table all year and I had almost nothing to do with it.