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Stocking Up 101 - Hot Smoking Tomatoes

A couple of summers ago I ended up with a bumper crop of tomatoes. Huge. Enormous. So many I had no idea what to do with them. We ate tomatoes in salads and on sandwiches and cooked dishes in every way I could think of that my very picky family would eat. No, they won’t eat salsa or gazpacho or chutney. I use very little tomato sauce, but I made some and still had tomatoes overflowing my kitchen.

I experimented with roasting some of them, which was good. This was before I got the dehydrator, or some of them would have ended up “sun dried.” Then I had the brainstorm.

Hickory smoke those babies as they were roasting.

Well, okay, I had some help thinking of the idea. Seems there is this guy in Texas who sells smoke-dried tomatoes at about $5 an ounce. They sounded wonderful but way too expensive. I don’t have a cold smoker, so I improvised, and you can too.

Start with a cold gas or charcoal grill (don’t heat it up yet!) and a basket or two of the freshest local tomatoes you can find. These are from Straight Mountain in the next county northeast. Best-tasting tomatoes I’ve ever had.

Now you need to get the hickory chips ready for the grill. There are two ways to do this: foil package or soaking. Either way works — what you are trying to do is to get the wood to a high enough temperature that it will pour out smoke but keep it from actually burning. Soaking the chips for 30 minutes adds water that must be evaporated prior to combustion, thus cooling the chips enough to smoke. Packaging them in foil excludes most of the oxygen necessary for combustion.

Soaking is easy. Just fill a big bowl with water, plunk in the wood chips, and put a saucer or something in there to hold the chips underwater. Leave it for 30 minutes or more, drain, and you are ready.

To package them, put a large handful of chips in the center of a sheet of aluminum foil (fork shown for scale; it doesn’t go in the packet). Here I’ve sealed two sheets of foil to make one larger sheet, because all I had on hand was the narrow stuff.

Fold up the foil to make a packet and crimp the ends down tight. Poke a few holes in the packet with a knife.

If you are using a gas grill, as I am, place the chip packet directly on the briquettes, under the rack. For soaked chips, just scatter them loose over the briquettes. Replace the rack. Now light the grill and turn the flame down as low as you can without turning it off.

If you are using a charcoal grill, remove the rack, light your charcoal and let it burn until the briquettes are covered with white ash. Now place your packet or scatter your soaked chips and replace the rack.

While the grill is heating, go back into the kitchen. Wash and quarter your tomatoes and arrange them on a big roasting pan. No need to seed or skin them. Drizzle a little olive oil over them. If you are going to eventually make spaghetti sauce, you could add basil or oregano at this point, but I leave mine plain because it’s more versatile that way.

Once you are getting a good smoke from the grill (about 20 minutes), put the pan of tomatoes on the rack and close the lid. Leave them for about another 20 minutes, until they look like this. They should be very soft with the skins ready to slip off. A little charring of the juices, as shown here, is fine too.

Remove the pan from the heat and let the tomatoes cool. Now you can freeze them, cover in olive oil and refrigerate for up to a month, or turn them into smoked tomato sauce. Next diary I will show you how to do that.