Aotearoa & Maori · Sauce
Tomato Relish
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a warm current of chile.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg ripe tomatoes
- 500 g onions
- 30 g salt
- 400 g sugar
- 350 ml malt vinegar
- 2 tbsp mustard powder
- 1 tbsp curry powder
- 1 tsp cayenne
- 2 tsp ground black pepper
- 30 g cornflour
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Pour boiling water over the tomatoes, count thirty seconds and slip the skins off, then chop them and the onions coarsely.
- Layer them with the salt in a bowl and leave overnight, then drain off the brine that has collected and throw it away.
- Simmer the drained tomato and onion with the sugar and 300 ml of the vinegar, uncovered and stirred often, until the pieces slump and the syrup sheets off a spoon.
- Slake the cornflour, mustard, curry powder, cayenne and pepper in the last 50 ml of cold vinegar, stir it in and cook five minutes more, until dragging a spoon across the pan leaves a channel that closes slowly.
- Ladle into hot sterilised jars while the relish is still above 85C (185F) and seal at once.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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