Just like the hipsters in Brooklyn we’ve been doing some home canning this summer, and with the last harvest of the year we grabbed a whole bunch of green tomatoes before the first frost hit. Hating to see such a beautiful lot go to waste we decided to turn them into some relish and can it so that we could share it and get a taste of summer (or I guess autumn) later in the winter. The recipe came from the University of Florida IFAS Extension School, and is really simple and easy if you use a food processor to make quick work of it all (while slower a good old fashion box grater would work and would likely add some hipster cred to your finished product). Basically the recipe consists of green tomatoes,peppers (we used green peppers and some banana peppers from the same harvest), onions, vinegar, mustard, cornstarch, and sugar, we also put some pickling spices in a tea ball to infuse with all that.(see the link above for the recipe, as always with canning its a good idea to follow an established recipe from a credible source – don’t want to flirt with botulism). Everything gets chopped up in the food processor into a fine dice and gets cooked up for five minutes in salted water in a big pot before being drained and then cooked up a second time for five minutes with the vinegar, sugar, etc. I wish we had thought to split the batch to make an extra spicy relish, but the stuff turned out great and would be great anywhere you’d use pickle relish and beyond.
Green tomatoes getting prepped
- the finished product – green tomato relish
