(lively music)
- Good day, I'm Mark from "Self Sufficient Me"
and this unique way of preserving tomatoes is amazing.
Let's get into it.
(gentle ambient music) (birds chirping)
I was meaning to put this video on my sub channel,
"Self Sufficient Me 2."
But I decided to release it on my main channel
because so many of you here requested this recipe.
So I saved half of one jar for this video
which wasn't easy because we wanted to eat it,
especially after using these tomatoes on our 21 days
eating only what we could grow experiment.
- I love the tomatoes.
Oh my gosh.
Making sure, though you had those fermented tomatoes
which I loved in that garlic.
- But yeah, I saved what was left for this video
but also, just to see how long it would last
because I hadn't done these before.
And from the packing or the fermenting stage to now
is almost 11 months.
Nearly a year.
There are three main reasons why you would want
to store tomatoes like this.
Preserving a lot of tomatoes,
the point of preserving is to keep food longer
than it would naturally.
You grow a ton of tomatoes,
and you can't possibly eat them all
so you preserve the excess to consume later,
often at a time when tomatoes are not in season.
Taste, this tastes amazing, it's unique
and it's not just another method of storing them.
It's a way to enhance the taste
so that it retains the unprocessed freshness of a tomato
but with the enhanced infused flavors
combined with the old fermented pickle flavor.
We'll do a taste taste on some sourdough bread,
like a kind of bruschetta
towards the end of this video.
And the last one is health.
Particularly gut health.
Humans have a live gut
with millions of bacteria
helping us to break down and process food
into nutrients our body needs.
When we get sick or use medication
or don't eat a balanced diet,
these bacteria die out
making it harder for us to digest foods,
fat bad bacteria, and effecting our good health overall.
Eating this type of fermented food
inoculates our gut with the good bacteria,
I know it doesn't sound very nice.
But it's just the way our bodies work.
And this good bacteria helps our inner health.
Now let's get stuck into the recipe.
How you make this is dead set easy as.
Get some tomatoes, the medium or cherry sized ones are best.
Give them a wash if needed,
and also, I remove the hard stem end,
but you might not need to with cherry tomatoes.
You'll also need some mason jars
or equivalent, that can be used for fermentation
with a standard fermenting kit,
a lid with a hull and rubber grommet
so an air lock can be inserted.
This just insures carbon dioxide can escape
during the fermentation process
but oxygen can't get into the mixture.
Place a few cloves of garlic and some basil
in the base of the jar
along with some distilled water or spring water,
free from any fluoride or chemicals,
as this might effect the development
of the lacta bacteria.
Then add one add one tablespoon of fine sea salt
per one liter, or quart sized jar,
or you can do it the other way around
and just add the salt first before the water.
Or just mix the salt and water before you add
the garlic and basil.
In other words, you can't stuff this up.
As long as the salt is dissolved in the mix,
it doesn't matter.
Pack the tomatoes into the jar
leaving a small gap at the top,
and I like to weigh the tomatoes down
to keep them under the liquid
as this reduces the chance of mold developing
or the mix going rancid.
There are various types of weights
or inserts that you can get
that will help keep your fermenting food submerged.
Place the lid on along with some water in the air lock
and then sit it on the kitchen bench or in the pantry
or in a cellar, et cetera,
where the temperature remains constant
between about 10 to 25 degrees Celsius.
After a few days, your tomatoes should be bubbling away
going through the fermenting process.
In about two to four weeks, they should be ready.
You can taste test to see how they are going
after the two week mark,
and if ready, they should be soft in texture,
have a rich tomato taste
with a nice salty sourness
infused with that garlic and basil.
Don't worry too much about mold
or discoloration or that cloudiness
through the tomato, a bit of whiteness here and there.
That won't effect anything.
Trust your taste and your nose.
If you take the top off and it smells awful and rancid,
my boys have just come home from school,
so you'll get a bit of extra noise
in the background no doubt.
But if it smells awful, well then it's probably no good.
And obviously if you've got a big green build up of mold
something has gone wrong.
A little bit of white floaties
and that's not a problem.
Once the fermenting process is done
you can store them in the fridge,
you can use a proper lid
because the air lock is no longer required.
And storing it in the fridge will help
the fermentation process,
and they should keep for many months
to be used as you wish.
And you can make a lot to things out of these tomatoes.
We made a cornbread biscuit salad,
home made corn bread from our own corn meal.
Mixed with some coriander salad
and balsamic vinegar.
These tomatoes also worked well as a base
for a vegetable curry,
just add it like you would to cook any sauce based dish.
Pasta would be another good example.
And let's now do a taste test on it
in real time, so I can show you another use for it
which is to make a sourdough bruschetta.
I've got to toast this first
so give me a sec.
Okay, while that's toasting,
let's just tip these out,
that's why I've got this tray here.
So that I don't make a big mess.
I've still got the weight in here
but it's fallen through
because what happens is
when the tomatoes just get a bit mushy
that weight falls through, but the job's done anyway,
it's kept them under the liquid
and once it's in the fridge, it doesn't matter.
I probably could have removed the weight long ago.
There we go.
It looks like a bit of a soup, doesn't it?
These bits here are just bits of basil,
not mold or anything.
Just soft basil leaves.
(toaster popping)
Oh, did you hear that? That's the toast.
Okay, gonna just use this.
I think one should be enough, but we'll see.
Put it on the plate,
and you can peel the skin,
you can leave the skin if you want.
I'm gonna peel the skin off.
Very soft, they are.
I'll make sure this toast doesn't get wet
but you can see how red that is.
Red and beautiful color.
It just smells so garlicky.
Put it on there.
And just spread it out like that.
Look at it, it's like a paste.
My goodness.
Oh my goodness.
Let's just add a little bit of this basil.
Now there's no need to add really anything else to this.
You know how pure Italian bruschetta would have
garlic rubbed on it first,
well you've got garlic infused with this already.
And you actually have basil infused with it too
but I'll just sprinkle that little bit of basil leaf
on the top to give it that little bit of,
don't do too much basil on it,
but you could chop up onion
or whatever, mix it in.
But I think just like this is perfect.
All right, let's dig in and have a taste.
Oh.
Oh wow.
I could've drizzled some olive oil over this
but I don't think it even needs that
because the taste is so intense.
The saltiness, the tomato,
a paste type taste.
But it's a freshness about it.
It's not like a cooked tomato paste.
It's hard to describe but you've got to give this a go,
if you have never tried fermenting tomatoes like this,
this is something really new and exciting.
For us especially, I mean,
you know, it's good for you
but you just do it for the antipasto types.
You know, people will be saying to you,
"How did you make this? What is this?
This is the best bruschetta I've ever tasted."
You know?
Oh. Mmm.
Wow.
(chuckles) I thought, hmm.
Yeah.
Come on guys, give it a go.
I hope I've convinced you
to give this a go.
I've got to stop eating this in front of you
because that's just rude
and also you don't want to hear me slopping around.
But what a beautiful, wonderful way
to eat this type of fermented food,
fermented tomatoes, get into it.
Well I hope you enjoyed this video
as much as I enjoyed eating it.
If you did, make sure you give it a big,
red, fermented tomato thumbs up
and share the video around,
subscribe if you haven't already,
and look, I know I'm going back into this
but you gotta give this a go.
This is incredible, this is so different
yet, beautiful.
Yeah, give it a crack
and write your comment down below
if you have any ideas or different ideas
on how you might want to use this type of fermented recipe.
But it is a cracker of a dish.
Yeah, thanks a lot for watching.
Bye for now.