Pickling End of the Season Tomatoes
For the record, I had a completely different plan for the end of tomato season.
I was going to let everything ripen slowly on the vine, pick the little cherry tomatoes as they turned red and orange, probably eat half of them while standing barefoot in the garden while Riesling begged me for more tomatoes, and pretend I had some sort of idyllic little farm situation happening in my Philadelphia backyard.
Instead, I found a mouse nest in the tomatoes. Well…my neighbor found it and let me know. Apparently my tomato plants weren’t only feeding me this year. They had also become a very charming little mouse condominium. I wish I were kidding.
The plants had gotten completely out of control by this point anyway, this huge tangled tomato jungle I’ve been talking about all summer, and somewhere underneath the vines a few mice had apparently decided that the shade, protection, and endless buffet made this prime real estate.
I can’t even blame them, because from the mouse’s perspective, fantastic choice. However, from mine…absolutely not.
So tomato season ended approximately fifteen minutes later. I started picking everything that hadn’t already split from this wet, wet, wet season. Red tomatoes, orange tomatoes, yellow or even pale green tomatoes all got plucked from the vine. When I say green tomatoes, I mean the tiny green ones that probably had weeks left before they were remotely ready. If it looked like a tomato and was attached to one of my plants, it was coming inside with me.
Which is how I ended up with a giant bag of tomatoes in basically every possible stage of ripeness and absolutely no plan for what to do with them.
My Tomatoes Are Ripening Very Strangely Now
A lot of these were completely green when I picked them, and watching them ripen inside has been kind of fascinating.
They aren’t all turning that beautiful uniform tomato red you get when fruit finishes naturally on the vine. A bunch of them are pink on one side and yellow on the other and I keep calling them sunset tomatoes in my head. A few of them are orange with green shoulders while some look almost translucent. It’s been two weeks now and a good amount of them are sitting there stubbornly green while their neighbors decided to speed-run the entire ripening process.
They look as confused as I feel when someone starts speaking to me in another language. I suppose it’s fair though because I interrupted them halfway through becoming tomatoes.
Tomatoes can continue ripening after they’re picked because they’re something called climacteric fruit, meaning they continue producing and responding to ethylene after harvest. That’s why a mature green tomato can eventually soften and change color even when it’s sitting on your kitchen counter instead of attached to the plant. The problem is that changing color and developing on the vine aren’t exactly the same experience.
That beautiful tomato flavor comes from a whole collection of sugars, acids, aroma compounds, texture changes, and other chemical processes happening as the fruit matures. When you pick a tomato very early, it could eventually become pink or red, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to taste like the tomato that spent another week warming in the sun.
I love tomatoes way too much to pretend otherwise, so I’m not going to sugar-coat it for you.
I’ve complained before about grocery-store tomatoes that look beautiful and somehow taste like refrigerated water, and now I had accidentally created a small army of them myself, so I needed another plan.
Obviously, I Decided to Pickle Them
So I ate all the red/ripe or starting to get ripe ones off the rip, those guys were a delightful little treat, and once they were out of the way I could fully focus on the green boys. The nice thing about pickling is that a tomato doesn’t have to become a perfect sweet summer tomato first. Actually, being slightly underripe is useful.
These little tomatoes are firmer than fully ripe ones, which means they’re much better at holding their shape in vinegar instead of collapsing into tomato mush. The green ones also have more acidity and that slightly vegetal flavor that works really well with garlic, dill, peppercorns, and vinegar.
If there’s one thing I am very good at doing, it’s convincing myself that an unexpected gardening problem was actually a culinary opportunity all along.
About the Mouse Situation
Before anyone emails me asking whether I pickled tomatoes that had been sitting directly inside a mouse nest, no.
If you’re out there reading this, please do not do that.
No matter how cute they might be (sometimes they are, you gotta admit it), rodents can spread disease through urine, droppings, and saliva, and food can become contaminated through contact with rodent waste. The exterminator told me no matter how small and harmless they look, they could actually get you and your pet pretty sick, which is why our instinct is “get away from me” when you see one.
Anything that had obvious damage, bites, droppings nearby, visible contamination, rot, or anything else that made me question it went into the trash. There are more tomatoes out there, I’m not risking hantavirus for a cherry tomato.
For the intact tomatoes I kept, I washed them really thoroughly under running water. The FDA recommends washing fresh produce under plain running water rather than using soap, bleach, or commercial produce washes, and they point out that washing can reduce bacteria but doesn’t magically sterilize produce. Normally I’m very much the person who looks at a tomato from my own backyard and goes, “eh, dirt is natural,” but those little cutie critters have temporarily cured me of that thought.
My Refrigerator-Pickled Tomato Recipe
I decided to make refrigerator pickles because I wasn’t trying to turn this into an entire canning operation (my husband would kill me honestly).
There are people on Instagram I see all the time who happily spend a Saturday boiling jars, measuring acidity, processing everything in a water bath, labeling lids, and stocking a pantry like they’re preparing for winter in 1843. I respect those people tremendously, however, I am not one of them. I’m just a girl working on ten billion projects at once with maybe an hour to spare.
I wanted something easy that would save a bunch of tomatoes and taste good in a few days.
For roughly two pint jars, I used:
3–4 cups firm tomatoes
1 cup white vinegar
½ cup apple cider vinegar
1¼ cup water
1½ tablespoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cloves garlic
Black peppercorns
Fresh dill
A little red pepper flake
You could absolutely play with this depending on what you like. Mustard seed would be great and I was searching my cabinet desperately for coriander seeds, but I couldn’t find them. Jalapeño or Thai Chilies would be great if I liked spicy things (I do not). A bay leaf certainly isn’t going to hurt anybody so I threw a couple in there.
I wanted mine garlicky, dilly, slightly spicy, and acidic enough that I’d want to eat them straight out of the jar while standing in front of the refrigerator at midnight.
Poke the Tomatoes First
This is the part I probably would have skipped if I hadn’t thought about it for two seconds.
Tomato skin is designed to protect the tomato, which means dropping a completely intact cherry tomato into vinegar doesn’t necessarily mean the vinegar is immediately getting inside. I poked the smaller tomatoes once (or twice) with a toothpick and cut some of the larger ones in half.
You don’t need to stab them like they’ve personally offended you, just poke them enough to give the brine somewhere to go. Next I packed them into clean jars with the garlic, dill, peppercorns, and pepper flakes.
For the brine, I heated the vinegar, water, salt, and sugar just until everything dissolved, then poured it over the tomatoes. That’s basically it. This obviously isn’t a shelf-stable canning recipe, so these stay in the refrigerator until I bring them into work and share with my coworkers. They’ll start tasting pickled after about a day, but I think they’re considerably better after three to five days when the garlic and spices have actually had time to get involved.
What Pickled Green Tomatoes Actually Taste Like
If you’ve never eaten a pickled green tomato before, don’t expect a dill pickle shaped like a tomato. They still taste distinctly tomato-y. The green ones have this crisp, tangy, slightly grassy flavor, while the orange and pink ones bring a little more sweetness. I had tomatoes at several different stages of ripeness, so every one tastes slightly different.
I actually love that because it’s more exciting. The green ones are firmer and sharper while the yellow sunset looking ones are a little softer and sweeter. The blush-pink ones taste more obviously like tomatoes, just with vinegar and garlic running through them.
Accidental tasting flight!! Sorry, sommelier brain never turns off.
Obviously I’ll eat them straight from the jar because I have no self-control around anything pickled, but I’m also already thinking about everything else they can go on. They’d be ridiculous on a cheeseboard with a creamy goat cheese or triple crème or chopped into tuna salad! Grilled fish with pickled tomatoes sounds sort of fire, but maybe I’m still dreaming about that branzino I ate in New Orleans at N7 (so stinking good!!).
Every year I garden, I become slightly less convinced that gardening is about controlling plants. You really don’t control much of anything besides what seeds to throw into the ground and which random plants start growing that you rip up.
You can water then fertilize and prune the heck out of your plants if you want, and build raised beds and put up trellises and carefully research companion plants and convince yourself that you’re running this extremely organized agricultural operation. Then it rains for nine days and everything gets water logged or it doesn’t rain for a month and your plants are shriveled little sad raisins.
For me it was a lot of squirrels taking a bite out of the one perfect tomato I had my eye on and leaving the rest of it sitting there like a taunt. Don’t even get me started on the figs that they’ve eaten almost all of this entire season. I’m annoyed that the mice built themselves a little home, but the truth is, it’s outside. They have to have somewhere to go too. As long as they aren’t running around my house, I sort of get it. They’re hungry little guys, and I was nice enough to supply them with a tomato buffet.
Nature is not particularly interested in my plans or what I’m hoping will come of this or that creation of mine.
At Least I Got the Tomatoes
Yes, yes, I wanted them red and juicy and perfectly firm and delicious. I wanted another few weeks of walking outside and picking tomatoes right before dinner or breakfast or whatever I was going to eat them for, but instead, I got an emergency harvest of half-ripe fruit because some mice decided my garden was an Airbnb.
I still grew them though. There are hundreds of little tomatoes sitting in my kitchen that started as tiny seeds months ago. That’s still pretty cool. Gardening rarely gives you exactly what you pictured when you planted the seed, but it usually gives you something.
I’ll take it.
