Pleasant Surprise! - Tomato Jam -

Tomato Jam on Toasts Well, how about this Japanese kissaten-style “morning set”-like toast? (Oh, of course they don’t decorate their “morning set” with roadside weeds like this ;P) On the thick slices of bread, which is very Japanese, is the tomato jam I made for the first time in my life! The combination of sugar and tomatoes was not totally new to me. When I was a kid, tomatoes were not very sweet or tasty even when they were ripe. It was rather rare to find kids who say “I like tomatoes.” Some elders in the countryside, including my grandparents, sprinkled bunch of sugar all over when they eat tomatoes, and I followed them, too. (I don't do that any more now.) Nevertheless, the idea of making jam out of tomatoes didn’t sound so tempting to me at first. Even with my childhood experience, I couldn’t imagine what it would taste like. Sure it must be sweet… because it’s jam, but… I had no idea how much of the tomato flavor would remain and go with the sweetness. Read More Then last weekend my mom came and brought me some of the big, ripe tomatoes that one of our relatives had given to my parents. They were very ripe and I was 100% sure that I would end up throwing away more than half of them if I didn’t eat them up within a couple of days. The best solution seemed to be cooking them. Maybe tomato sauce? I’m planning some gumbo recipe exploration this summer, so tomato sauce would be really useful. But… another voice inside of me said “Hey it’s the best chance to find out what tomato jam would taste like!!” And the voice finally won. Making tomato jam was pretty easy, much easier than the marmalade I made before. The only problem was that I made my jam a little too sweet. The recipe (in Japanese) said 200 – 300g sugar for 1kg of tomatoes, and I used 230g sugar for a little less than 1kg tomatoes. Plus, I added a little pectin powder at the end. I forgot about this at that time but our store-bought pectin powder is already mixed with sugar, so it added extra sweetness to my jam. I’m not reluctant to call this result a success, though. It tastes fine with buttered toast. Would be nice for tarts and pies, too, if combined with something sour. There seem to be some other interesting ideas on the net such as adding black pepper or ginger to tomato jam. Hmmmm…This is going to give me lots of fun this summer! I’m glad that I gave this a try :) * I couldn't wait until the next time, so I already tried adding some ground black pepper to the jam. I definitely like it BETTER with the black pepper!!