Dominique Crenn’s Tomato Salad With Crème Fraîche Recipe
Written by MasterClass
Last updated: Jun 11, 2022 • 6 min read
Chef Dominique Crenn’s tomato salad recipe celebrates the tomato in all its forms: confit cherry tomatoes, marinated heirloom tomatoes, dehydrated tomato, a tomato vinaigrette, and dehydrated tomato petals. Each component reveals a different tomato flavor: The umami of the dried tomatoes complements the sweetness of the fresh ripe tomatoes, and a layer of crème fraîche adds richness.
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About Dominique Crenn
Dominique Crenn is an award-winning chef and advocate for sustainability and equity in the culinary world. Growing up in the Brittany region in northwest France, Chef Crenn spent many hours working in her grandmother’s potato fields, foraging for mushrooms with her father and brother, and partaking in her family’s Sunday dinners. Her father’s best friend, a restaurant critic in Brittany, sometimes brought her along on his tasting trips. These experiences sparked her imagination and taught Chef Crenn to think of cooking as a form of storytelling. All of these memories, and the familial and communal love they evoked, would become touchstones in her cooking.
Though she is now among the world’s most celebrated chefs, her path to culinary greatness was not without its challenges. After being turned away from many French culinary schools due to antiquated opinions about female chefs, Chef Crenn set out for California, where she forged her own culinary identity rooted in personhood, memories, and mindfulness.
In San Francisco, Chef Crenn honed her skills at fine dining establishments before eventually opening her own restaurant, Atelier Crenn, in 2011 (named for her father’s painting studio in Brittany). Atelier Crenn’s reputation grew year by year: It received one Michelin star in 2011, two in 2012, and finally, the highest honor of three stars in 2018. At the restaurant, diners receive a poem instead of a menu, with each dish represented by a line of poetry. Chef Crenn describes her practice of tying food to language as “poetic culinaria.”
What Is Tomato Salad?
A tomato salad is a side dish or appetizer featuring summer tomatoes. This summer salad is popular worldwide. In Indian cuisine, diced tomatoes and cucumbers often appear together in a family of relishes known as kachumber. In Madhur Jaffrey’s tomato-cucumber salad recipe, they get tossed with fresh lemon juice and ground cumin and topped with a tadka—a technique of cooking a mixture of spices in fat to release their essential oils—of mustard seeds and curry leaves.
Fattoush is a Middle Eastern pita bread salad that often includes tomatoes, thinly sliced red onions or green onions, fresh parsley, and feta cheese. Italian Caprese salad is one of the most famous tomato recipes. This fresh tomato salad features tomatoes tossed with mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, black pepper, and balsamic vinegar or red wine vinegar.
About Dominique Crenn’s Tomato Salad
In her memoir, Rebel Chef, Chef Crenn explains that she embraces the essence of a tomato by approaching it from different angles through various preparations. “This is something visual artists understand better than chefs, perhaps,” she says. “That a dish of this kind is simultaneously a tomato and an idea of a tomato. The interplay of the two is what I am striving for. It is possible to taste and think at the same time.”
Tomato Evolved isn’t exactly an easy recipe—it’s the culmination of two other tomato recipes from Chef Crenn: Tomato Illuminated (confit tomatoes) and Tomatoes Enhanced (dehydrated tomatoes). You’ll need to make those two recipes first before trying this one, but the effort is well worth it. Choose the best farmers’ market or garden tomatoes for the marinated heirloom tomato component.
For this recipe, the tomato water is a byproduct of the tomato trim, so yield amounts are dependent on other ingredients. The steps to create the tomato gel below take this factor into account.
Dominique Crenn’s Tomato Evolved (Tomato Salad With Crème Fraîche)
makes
prep time
30 mintotal time
40 mincook time
10 minIngredients
For the marinated tomato:
For the tomato water:
For the tomato gel:
For the crème fraîche:
For serving:
Notes: The total time does not include 1 hour and 45 minutes of inactive time. For this recipe, you will need to make 20 dehydrated tomato petals according to the instructions in Chef Crenn’s Tomato Enhanced recipe and 140 grams tomato vinaigrette and 20 confit tomatoes according to the instructions in Chef Crenn’s Tomato Illuminated recipe. Reserve the tomato trim from these recipes to make the tomato water.
Make the marinated tomato:
- 1
Slice the heirloom tomatoes into ¼-inch rounds, starting from the bottom, and fan the slices out on a large plate (be sure to trim away the end of the tomato and save it for making the tomato water).
- 2
Season the tomato slices with kosher salt, and let them sit until their liquid starts to seep out, about 1 minute.
- 3
Drizzle the slices with lemon juice, sherry vinegar, and olive oil.
- 4
Allow the slices to marinate, uncovered, at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Make the tomato water:
- 1
Use a juicer or food processor to liquify all of the tomato trim reserved in the course of preparing the other components.
- 2
Transfer the tomato juice to a medium pot and simmer over medium-low heat until froth starts to form.
- 3
Continue simmering until no more foam rises to the top and the liquid becomes mostly clear, about 5 minutes.
- 4
Skim the froth from the surface of the simmering tomato water with a spoon.
- 5
Remove the pot from the heat, and line a small chinois or strainer with a coffee filter.
- 6
Place the chinois or strainer on top of a glass jar, then season, to taste, the tomato water with lemon juice, sherry vinegar, and kosher salt—but do not mix.
- 7
Ladle the tomato water into the coffee filter, and let it strain for about 30 minutes.
Make the tomato gel:
- 1
Use a kitchen scale to measure 350 grams of tomato water and a gram scale to measure 1.75 grams of kosher salt (0.5 percent salt by weight) and 0.7 grams of agar-agar (0.2 percent by weight).
- 2
Add the salt to the tomato water, and mix well.
- 3
In a small saucepan set over medium heat, warm about a ⅓ of the salted tomato water until it comes to a boil.
- 4
Lower the heat to medium-low so that the liquid is at a simmer.
- 5
Whisk vigorously while gradually pouring the agar-agar into the tomato water over the course of about 30 seconds.
- 6
Once the agar-agar is incorporated, immediately remove the saucepan from the heat, and continue whisking while slowly adding the remainder of the salted tomato water.
- 7
While the tomato water is still warm, break up any clumps with the whisk, then strain the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer into a medium bowl.
- 8
Transfer the bowl to the refrigerator, and let the mixture sit, uncovered, until it sets and becomes a gel, 30–60 minutes. (The more gel you make, the longer it will take to set.) You want the gel to be the consistency of a gelatin dessert.
Make the crème fraîche:
- 1
Season the store-bought crème fraîche with lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of the lemon zest, and fleur de sel or kosher salt.
- 2
Whisk until all of the ingredients are combined.
- 3
Gently transfer the crème fraîche into a pastry bag, and refrigerate it until you’re ready to serve.
Assemble and serve the tomato salad:
- 1
Arrange 3 slices of marinated tomato at the bottom of each bowl. Transfer any leftover oil and tomato juice from the marinated tomato plate into the tomato vinaigrette.
- 2
Spoon 1 tablespoon of the tomato vinaigrette onto the marinated tomato slices in each bowl.
- 3
Remove the crème fraîche from the refrigerator, snip the end from the pastry bag, and taste. If the crème fraîche is seasoned to your liking, pipe it in a spiral pattern over the marinated tomato slices, starting at the center of the bowl.
- 4
Use tweezers to arrange 5 dehydrated tomato petals in a radial pattern from the center.
- 5
Spoon the Sungold tomatoes from the tomato confit onto paper towels to drain some of the oil. (Use the leftover oil for another confit project.)
- 6
Place 4 confit tomatoes into each bowl: one atop each tomato petal, and a final tomato in the center.
- 7
Add additional dehydrated tomato petals and crème fraîche as desired to create a pleasing visual design.
- 8
Use the spoon to break up the tomato gel.
- 9
Add small spoonfuls of the gel to the salad.
- 10
Drizzle more tomato vinaigrette on top of everything, then use tweezers to finish the dish with fresh herbs and edible flowers.
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