Just Bento

I'm afraid that I very, very rarely get to enjoy green tomatoes in London.

There are a few recipes for green tomato pickles on the internet in Japanese. Unfortunately, I don't read or write it (it's more of a crossword puzzle for me - I tend to decipher what I can)

I used 青トマトのピクルス as a search term and found a few recipes using Google. This was one of the clearest I saw. I've included the results from two translation tools - if you can flick between them what is missed out in one version of the recipe is generally covered by the other.

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.c-playe...

http://www.excite-webtl.jp/world/english/web/?wb_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-...

My concern is that it doesn't mention how long the pickles need to marinade before they are ready. But from what I can tell from the other recipes, I'd guess it was a week (some recipes say two weeks).

Unfortunately, green tomato pickles aren't really typical of Japanese cooking so they don't feature at all in any of the tsukemono references I usually use (tomatoes in Japan only started being eaten in any significant quantities from the 1920s and only became widely cultivated from the 1960s). From what I can tell, green tomato pickles are a speciality of some parts of Eastern Europe, such as Romania and Bulgaria, but I know very little about these cuisines. Nevertheless, I'd love to try pickles made with this fruit some day, I really do like green tomatoes and will happily gorge on the varieties available in Spain whenever I get the chance... raw, with a touch of sea salt (mmm... I'm drooling now!)

Green Tomato Relish is a common New Zealand pickle - but it is more of a sauce than a vegetable. There is a recipe here and another here (it's a pdf).
I love the stuff, and it's great for using up tomatoes that are never going to ripen at the end of summer.

I would say that pickles may work better, but here is a very simple tsukemono recipe

For every 1 kilo (2.2lb) of green tomatoes) use:
- 1 liter water (1 quart)
- 50-60g salt (about 2 ounces) sea salt
- a pickle weight, a bucket or pickling pot

Clean and wash the tomatoes well, discarding any bad or bruised ones.

Dissolve the salt in the water.

Put the tomatoes in a clean, sterilized bucket or pickling pot. Pour in the salt water. Put a plate or something on top, put on a weight (a stone or a big jar filled with water would do), then cover the whole with something (a plastic garbage bag would do) to keep out any critters. Put in a cool, dark place for at least a week.

(You can add MSG to the salt if you don't object to MSG.)

If you have a nukadoko, you can put sliced and deseeded green tomatoes in there. (Nukadoko making is a whole other topic, book even)

Another alternative is to buy some Tsukemono Powder or Tsukemono Mix at a Japanese grocery store. The powder you can just sprinkle on sliced deseeded tomatoes, for almost instant pickles. The mix is mixed with water to make a sort of pickling water, in which you can put your sliced deseeded tomatoes. But this is for pickles to be eaten within a few days though.