So last summer I had way too many tomatoes, and made a lot of tomato shrub, which my sister turned me on to. I also made some pluot and fig shrub from the garden when my siblings visited, but i don’t have much of those left.
A few months from now I will again have more tomatoes than I can use, and want to use this gallon of tomato shrub before I make more.
Not sure why I haven’t used it more. Not sure why I don’t make more gastrique, which I think I would love, as a quick sauce for the lean meat and fish my husband prefers. Salad dressings would be good too.
Any ideas about how to use a tomato shrub to make a gastrique?
Put your shrub in a saucepan over low heat and reduce it until it coats the back of your spoon.
Remove from heat.
Drizzle over a peach crumble or enjoy it over vanilla ice cream. This gastrique should last for many months in your fridge, if you can save it that long!
What do you use tomato shrub for? I could think of a Bloody Mary-ish cocktail or mocktail, of course, but curious.
The gastrique is an excellent idea!
I have a stockpile of lemon and orange shrubs in the fridge at the moment. We’ve been using the orange for cocktails and the lemon for lemonade. I’m hoarding the sweet lime and ginger.
In the summer I drank it a few times, but not much. I think salad dressing would be good, but don’t seem to get around to it. I just grew/grow way too many tomatoes .
If you have this high quality problem again this year, I’d suggest slow-roasting the tomatoes steadily through the season - semi-dehydrates and concentrates the flavor, and they can be frozen or canned more compactly. Oh, that’s assuming you don’t eat them like candy… they are ridiculously delicious.
Interesting, we make lots of shrubs but this is the first I’ve heard of a gastrique. I see some experimentation in the future. I could see making one by reducing a shrub & adding things like shallots, garlic, mustard?. But to have the sugar caramelized you’d have to start from scratch. How important is this flavor? Only experimentation will tell. Please keep us posted.
I wondered about how important the caramel flavor was as well, but I’m not starting over!
So far I’ve just tried reducing about a quart until it was the consistency I thought was right, but I haven’t used it in a dish yet. It was quite “piquant” on it’s own.
I’ve gone through half the bottle now, not carmelized, but reduced and “mounted” with butter, and served with salmon, pork, and chicken. I’m so happy to be using it.
Working on plum, nectarine, and maybe pluot gastrique.
Nectar Z nectarine is still my favorite for eating out of hand, like a mad woman in the garden, taking on every scrub jay who tries me, so nectarine shrub might not happen.
