Food, Home & Lifestyle

Tomato: Illuminated

Lesson time 09:37 min

Building on your blanching techniques, learn how to confit peeled tomatoes. You can also add the tomato petals you’ve already made to create a more intricate dish that can stand on its own or be incorporated into a recipe in the next tomato lesson.

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Topics include: Tomato Illuminated * Tomato Confit * Vinaigrette

Dominique Crenn

Teaches Modern Vegetarian Cooking

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] - To-may-to, to-mah-to. Look at this. Amazing. So let's look over the tomato. I'm going to show you later how to confit them. Confit is cooking slowly in a fat. This is how you need to pick your tomato. You got to look at the color of the tomato and just touch them a little bit. If they're too mushy, then maybe they went too far. If they are too hard, then this is not the right one. You want them to be enough-- See, I push. Oh yeah, it's bouncing. This is perfect. If I take one that is not, see this one is not ready. It's hard. It's hard and-- Do you hear that? That's not good. It's very sour. It's very tart. [MUSIC PLAYING] In the Tomato Enhanced chapter, I showed you how to dehydrate tomato peels. We will use those here and illuminate the tomatoes with a confit technique. For the plated dish, I will put the tomato confit in a bowl, add in vinaigrette, top with tomato petals, and garnish with herbs and flowers. I'm going to show you how to make a tomato confit. Beautiful Sun gold tomato. Look at those babies. OK, once again it's very important before you do anything you always have to test your product. Mm. It's delicious. So what I did first, I kind of peeled them the same way. I used the same technique from the Tomato Enhanced chapter. I made the incisions, blanched, shocked, and then peeled the tomatoes. We can see there's no skin. This is still firm. So what do you want to do is to make sure that when you blanch them, and they could be very small, so it's pretty tricky sometimes. Maybe you want to blanch the smaller ones first and then blanch the bigger ones. Just a little trick. Don't blanch all of them together. So you can separate it and size matters, especially for this. Not always, but especially for this. Anyway, I'm going to show you how to do a confit. So what is confit? In the cooking world, mean is cooking slowly in a fat. So we're going to use grapeseed oil. Or could do also with olive oil, but I like grapeseed oil. A little bit of aromatic to it. And then just go to the oven. So first, taking a baking pan just lay your tomato a nicely. Spread them out. Beautiful tomato. They're very sweet. This is one of my favorite, by the way. [MUSIC PLAYING] Just a little bit of-- Obviously, you see I'm using a lot of shallot. Shallot is something that I love to cook with. It's a part of my culture, my DNA. So I love them. Peeled garlic, lemon, basil. But once again, whatever aromatic you. Want you can put thyme, rosemary, marjoram, whatever-- sage. And then you should just pour nicely-- A bit of salt, of course, because I love salt. And then you just go around it. I like to put on the side so I don't really soak the tomato from the top and just go around gently. And the oil should cover everything. So once again, confit is not going to like overcook the tomato. Confiting is to cook gently, literally, the tomato. What I'm showing you a lot, I love slow cookin...

About the Instructor

With three James Beard awards and a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Chef Dominique Crenn has transcended traditional vegetarian fare by treating cooking as a kind of poetic expression. Now the celebrated chef invites you to discover inspired vegetarian cooking. Following a full tasting menu of recipes, learn how to elevate your techniques, minimize waste, and turn vegetarian dishes into works of art.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Dominique Crenn

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

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