Finally we are nearing the end of our Brickworks picnic posts.  It truly was one of the most fantastic days of my life but I am excited to move on (as I am sure many of you are).  The truth is that I haven’t been able to think of much else so writing about anything other than the event (at least in the days before it) would have been a moot point.  Several people asked for details on what we made, so here it goes.

The taste was described as:

dried tomato with cider vinegar and maple syrup rehydrated with preserved tomato sauce on a cracker made with dehydrated vegetable powders: carrots, onion and garlic

There were a few inspirations/ motivations behind the dish including:

1. I wanted to show that preserving food didn’t need to be reserved for condiments
2. preserving is not limited to sugar-canning
3. Showcase the flavors preserving can bring to your table in the middle of winter.

The cracker was a bit of  an afterthought for most so we won’t go into detail unless asked (feel free).  We made a fairly normal cracker which included 1.5 teaspoons of dehydrated onions, 0.5 teaspoon of dehydrated carrots and 0.5 teaspoons of dehydrated garlic (which had been roasted with sunflower seeds and salt).  Our ‘tiny serving trays’ were based loosely ona mire foie (I couldn’t get local celeriac on time to dry fo the picnic) and laid base flavors for the sauce.  They were hearty enough to withstand the juicy tomato on top and didn’t make a lot of culinary sense by themselves (they are not exactly for cheese).  The cracker had local wheat, oil, water and non-local salt.

The tomato was a combination of two different methods of preserving which have a secret punch when combined:

1. Dehydration.  We sliced tomatoes and let them rest in a strainer.  A quick coating of maple syrup and apple cider vinegar washed through the strainer but it’s remnants left increased acidity and sweetness.  This brought the essence of tomato (while keeping the authenticity of our region) to the forefront.  The tomato entered the dehydrator with a bit of sea salt at 140 degrees farenheit until near-crispy.  This took 18-24 hours.  The average bite included about 0.25 of an entire tomato.  Some of the end product was sweet, some acidic and many up the middle (this was evened out in step 3).  The essence of dehydration is that you remove 90% water content and are left with the essence of the flavor.
2. We made and bottled tomato sauce.  I really can’t say anything more than we’ve already said about tomato sauce here.  We did, however, cook it down really thick.  I am guessing that we removed 50% of the water leaving really tasty tomato solids.
3. We rehydrated the tomatoes from step 1 in the sauce from step 2.  Rehydration essentially occurs when dried foods are submerged in wet foods and they absorb the liquid to gain density and (assuming you don’t use water), gain the flavor of what they are rehydrated in.  Since our sauce had removed a lot of water, we essentially infused a dehydrated tomato with more tomato.  This meant that each bite was now up to – and beyond half of a tomato).  Rehydration was sped up by a moderate heating of the dried flesh over a gently heat.

Rehydrating vegetables (or fruit) in a liquid other than water is a preserving method that has lasted hundreds of years.  Tomatoes in oil are an example while tea and coffee are distant cousins.

The results are intriguing.  A small taste suddenly contains the flavor of more than half of a tomato concentrated into a tiny taste that fills your mouth like the bright sun of August.  You can simulate this dish at home with dehydrated tomatoes rehydrated in tomato sauce but most commercial products will not come close to the concentrated flavors of the real deal.

Fresh basil (which can be grown inside in Toronto in the winter) topped our taste.  The final concoction would have been half the product without the herb.

Simplified, this is tomato infused with tomato.  Any way you wish to explain it, it’s a complete explosion of the fresh harvest that you can eat year-round.