Tomato love fest: our favorite ways to celebrate ripe beauties at the late-summer height of their season

By Leslie Brenner

Summer Produce Special Part III: Tomatoes

Ripe and bursting with flavor, tomatoes do not want to be fussed with. That’s why some of the most delicious things you can do with them don’t require a recipe.

• Slice them, arrange them on a plate, strew Maldon salt on them, grind black pepper generously, drizzle your best olive oil and serve with crusty bread.

• Want to get fancier? Add dollops of fresh ricotta, or slices of mozzarella, or pull apart a ball or two of burrata and arrange it on top. From there you can add torn basil, a flurry of mixed fresh herbs, or a big handful of baby arugula. If you go the arugula route, a drizzle of really good balsamic wouldn’t be a bad idea.

• Peel, seed and dice ripe tomatoes, put them in a bowl with a good dollop of great olive oil, salt, pepper and lots of torn basil, let it sit an hour or so, then use to toss with pasta. Grated parm or cubed mozzarella optional.

• BLT. This is the best time all year to eat the iconic sandwich. That slab of gorgeous red tomato with all its juices mingles meaningfully with the mayo on perfect toast, hopefully one of those sourdoughs your friend or partner has been perfecting, or good whole-wheat. Cool crunch of iceberg, chewy-crisp, salty-smoky warm bacon: This is sandwich nirvana. To get one made with the proper care and love, you’ll probably have to make it yourself. Eat it alone and enjoy every bite.

• Make a simple, beautiful, easy tomato tart: Roll out thawed frozen puff pastry, poke holes in it with a fork, cover with slices of tomato (lay them first on paper towels, salt them and let them sit a few minutes to get rid of moisture), salt, pepper, thyme leaves and crumbled goat cheese. Bake 25 minutes at 400. Slice and eat. This one gets a recipe.

• I’m not saying you should do this, but one of my mom’s favorite things to eat was juicy slices of tomato on white bread slathered with mayo. Call it a poor man’s BLT. Other times she would hold a large ripe tomato in her hand, take a bite, sprinkle the rest of it with salt and eat it like that, out of hand. This, she told me, was how she liked to eat tomatoes when she was a kid and she picked them, warm and ripe and bursting with flavor, from her victory garden at home in New Jersey during World War II.

Tomatoes à la Provençale, from a Julia Child recipe

• Invite them to the South of France — by way of Tomatoes à la Provençale. Make a filling of bread crumbs, herbs, chopped shallots, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and stuff that into half-tomatoes you’ve emptied of seeds and juice. Roast 10 or 15 minutes at 400 and eat. Here’s Julia Child’s recipe, which I’ve been making my whole life.

• Blitz up a batch of Gazpacho Sevillano. Maybe you tried this in May, hoping to usher in summer, but the tomatoes weren’t quite in the mood yet. Now they are. Three pounds of tomatoes, a cuke, a red bell pepper, torn-up day old bread, Sherry vinegar, a couple or three garlic cloves put through a press, a pinch of red pepper, more salt than you think: Into the blender they go, and whirr away. Drizzle in some olive oil while the motor’s running. Some people let it chill in the fridge so the “flavors meld”; I usually can’t wait and just eat it like that, garnished with another drizzle of olive plus diced veg, especially avocado.

• Try a less common cold Spanish soup, Salmorejo, which is Córdoba’s version of gazpacho, garnished traditionally with chopped hard-boiled egg and Serrano ham. Our recipe is adapted from one by superchef José Andrés.

Palestinian Chopped Salad (Salata Arabieh), from ‘Falastin’ by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley

• When the tomatoes get ripe, the smart go chopping. Ripe tomatoes are fabulous in the chopped salad that’s ubiquitous on Levantine tables, including Palestinian ones. Cucumbers, bell peppers (red in this case), scallions, parsley, mint and serrano or jalapeño chiles, garlic and lemon join the fun. Our recipe is adapted from Falastin, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley.

RECIPE: Palestinian Chopped Salad

RECIPE: Salmorejo

RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

RECIPE: Tomatoes à la Provençale

RECIPE: Tomato Tart with Goat Cheese and Thyme

RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad

Celebrate tomato season with salmorejo (a cousin of gazpacho) or tomato-burrata salad

We like to eat pretty simply and lightly at home during summer — that is, when it’s just Thierry and me. When Wylie’s here, he’s happiest making something complicated and involved, with as many ingredients as possible, especially well marbled proteins — and bonus points for flambéing, searing in cast-iron on maximum heat so the smoke alarm goes off or finishing a sauce with a fat knob of butter.

While tomatoes are bursting with flavor, I’d be happy eating nothing more than tomato salad with crusty bread three nights a week — especially if it can be the burrata variation of a classic Caprese, just sliced heirloom tomatoes, burrata, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I’m embarrassed to write about the salad, as it’s so obvious and doesn’t require a recipe. But it feels disingenuous to assemble a dish so frequently and never mention it once in years of publishing — especially as there are young cooks and beginning cooks who may be less familiar with it.

You probably already knew how to make it (maybe you have your own version). To me what elevates it is using great olive oil, the freshest and fruitiest you can find, and my favorite finishing salt, Maldon (love those large, fragile flakes). When burrata’s not to be had, good ricotta can be nice in its place, and of course mozzarella goes back to the classic, if you’re feeling more nostalgic.

Here’s an actual recipe for the burrata version, just for the record (or if you want to forward it to your 19-year old nephew who’s learning to cook):

Classic Gazpacho Sevillano also shows up constantly on our summertime table; it’s one of my favorite dishes of all time. But until recently, I had never made salmorejo, its close cousin from nearby Córdoba (though I mentioned it in a 2003 Los Angeles Times story that won me a James Beard Award). Both Córdoba and Sevilla are in Spain’s southern region of Andalusia, a hot region where cold soups refresh in the summer.

Salmorejo is a cold, smooth, creamy cold soup whose basic ingredients are fewer than gazpacho’s: just tomatoes, bread (quite a lot of it), garlic, oil and salt. Vinegar is commonly included, though it is not necessarily traditional. The traditional — and still ubiquitous — garnish duo is chopped hard-boiled egg and serrano ham.

At a reader’s request I pulled out my blender and my history books and began salmorejo R & D. (Yes, we love cooking to order: If there’s something you’d like us to cover, let us know!)

Claudia Roden tells us in her marvelous, encyclopedic 2011 book The Food of Spain something I hadn’t known when I wrote that long-ago gazpacho story: that Seville was the province where tomatoes were first grown in Spain, and that gazpacho was the meal that farm works made when they worked the vegetable fields. They actually carried with them a dornillo, the large wooden mortar and pestle used to pound the ingredients and made the gazpacho on the spot.

Roden describes salmorejo as “a thick, dense, creamy version of gazpacho made with more bread,” one that you find at all the flamenco festivals and other festive occasions, served with a glass of wine, as well as at “every bar and tavern in Córdoba, topped with chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of jamón serrano.”

In fact, there is quite a lot of bread in salmorejo. If gazpacho is like a liquid salad, salmorejo is like a liquid sandwich — though it eats like a refreshing cold soup. “Some recipes have as much bread as tomatoes,” writes Roden. Needless to say, Keto adherents need not apply.

Another Spanish cooking expert, Anya von Bremzen, calls salmorejo in her 2005 book The New Spanish Table “Andalucia’s other tomato and bread masterpiece.” She describes it as “a cream with a texture that falls somewhere between a dip and a soup,” and points out that besides being a soup, it’s also wonderful as an accompaniment for crudités or “a pile of poached shrimp.” She also likes to serve it in shot glasses as a tapa, topped with a poached or grilled shrimp on a skewer. (Note to self: do that!)

South of Córdoba in Antequera, a town about 30 miles north of the Mediterranean coast, a cousin of salmorejo called porra is garnished with bits of tuna. And of course you can garnish salmorejo with a wide variety of things — von Bremzen suggests small poached shrimp, diced cooked potatoes and/or chopped tomatoes and onions, or those small chunks of canned tuna.

Von Bremzen and Roden both offer recipes that look excellent, and that I’ll definitely get around to trying theirs. (Curiously, I didn’t find one among the 1,080 recipes in Simone and Inés Ortega’s 1080 Recipes. Originally published in 1972 by Simone Ortega, 1080 recetas de cocina, as it’s called in Spain, is known as the Bible of cooking for Spanish home cooks.)

This batch, made with a combo of yellow and red tomatoes, turned out more orange than red.

Instead I went with Spanish-American chef José Andrés, who published a brilliantly simple version in Food & Wine in 2017 (it’s always safe to side with a superhero!).

For his recipe, toss tomatoes, crustless rustic white bread, sherry vinegar, garlic, salt and water in the blender, give it a good, long, thorough blitz so it’s very smooth, stream in some olive oil as the motor’s running, then serve, garnished with torn slices of serrano ham, a swirl of olive oil and chopped hard-boiled egg. I was surprised at how little vinegar Andés calls for — just a teaspoon for 2 1/2 pounds of tomatoes — but it was perfect.

Got tomatoes? Here’s the recipe:

Once you try it as is, you might want to riff on it, adding more or less bread, vinegar and salt to taste, and of course playing with garnishes.

All the recipes I found called for chilling the soup before eating, but I don’t imagine those farm workers who invented it brought coolers, and I couldn’t wait; besides, things tend to be more flavorful when they’re room temperature.

In, any case, it was deliciously refreshing straight from the blender jar.

Happy tomato season!

[RECIPE: Salmorejo]

[RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad]