Playing around with vegetables, part I: yellow tomato salad

One of Brillat-Savarin famous quotes is his belief that The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. Hard to argue with that, unless you're an astrophysicist. Ever tried eating a star? Take it from a chemist, burning balls of gasses are not palatable. As much as I agree with the Frenchman quote, I have to confess that given the choice between a new dish and a new ingredient I'd go always for the new ingredient. With a new dish, once you taste and enjoy it you're done. Having a new ingredient instead is like having a new toy: I can play with it, taste, test and tinker around till I know it better and start getting ideas, or, well, just nick them from a cookbook.

You can imagine my happiness in finding not one but three different vegetables I hadn't seen before in one of local the supermarkets, curiously the one that usually has the worst greengrocers section. I bought a good amount of all three and started making a cooking plan. The first vegetable to land on my chopping board were yellow tomatoes. I always wondered why in Italian tomatoes are called pomodori or pomidoro which means golden apples. I guess the colour of my yellow tomatoes might be a good explanation: maybe the first tomatoes to reach Italy were yellow.

Well, the past is the past, better concentrate on what's there. Before deciding what to do with the tomatoes I sliced one and had a taste: mild, pleasantly sweet, definitely a more subtle taste than normal red tomatoes. I toyed for a while with the idea of pairing them with other mild tasting ingredients but decided instead for a stronger contrast, matching the yellow tomatoes with stronger tasting ingredients and hoping their taste would not get overpowered. In the end I went for a double tomato salad, yellow sliced and tiny Romas diced, with some fresh oregano and a few black dry cured Turkish olives. I t worked like a charm: the two tomatoes created a very nice match and oregano and olives, added in a small quantity, added a nice flavour contrast. It made a nice side dish for the tiropitakia. Plus the salad looked great, don't you think?

Two tomatoes salad
serves four as side dish

8 medium sized yellow tomatoes, sliced
8 baby Roma tomatoes, diced
16 dry cured black olives, pitted
4 sprigs of fresh oregano, leaves and tips

for the vinaigrette
4 Tbsp EVO oil
2 tsp Balsamic vinegar (a decent commercial one, not the "real" aged one)
salt, freshly grated black pepper

Lay the yellow tomato slices at the bottom of the plate, sprinkle with chopped Roma tomatoes, olives and some fresh oregano. Sprinkle about 1 Tbsp vinaigrette on the salad.

Comments

[Jennifer]

Mmmm. Yellow tomatoes - yummy yummy yum yum yum. I grew some once that were called "Lemon Boys" and while they didn't taste like lemon, they were possibly the most delicious tomatoes I'd ever had.
I too find myself turning towards tomatoes, Alberto -- great minds, hmm? Beautiful salad, by the way.

[Alberto]

The Lemon Boys sound really appetising. I would have loved to know what variety the ones I had were, just for curiosity, but I have a bit of a fruit-veg variety fetish :-). BTW this might interest you: a new kind of black tomato seems to be the rage in the UK

http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/mar/02shyam.htm

Happy you liked the salad.

[johanna]

isn't it funny how you sometimes immediately discard some shops when on the lookout for something? this week i had a similar experience with Tesco's - I had been looking for mooli/daikon/white radish at every greengrocer, market, waitrose for a few months now, ended up bringing them from Austria. yesterday i went shopping at said supermarket with a friend: their selection is terrible, not too happy with the quality eiter, the display horrific, but guess what I found - mooli!

[daphne]

tomatoes in french are also called pomme d'amour or apples of love. I just planted tomato plants and the yellow pear tomato is one of my favourite. Your tomato salad looks a lot like the one I recently posted on my site except I've got green olives (the jumbo greek green olives are my favourite salty contrast to a sweet ripe tomato). Yay for the simplicity of summer vegetables or shall we say fruit but that's a whole different tangent.