Trash Eating With Claire: Tomato Salt and Sugar in Peach Peels
I’m a big fan of turning seemingly useless scraps into something amazingly tasty, so it was a pleasure stumbling across these tomato peel salt and peach rind sugar recipes on Food52 .
Both tomato skins and peach skins seem like a dead end waste at first. They are flimsy, tasteless and a little odd in terms of texture. Drying them and concentrating their aroma for use in a tasty powder seemed like too much of a solution, and I knew both of these recipes were something I had to try to be believed.
Tomato Skin Salt Gabriel Hamilton
This idea is the brainchild of Gabrielle Hamilton and can be found among many other treasures in her cookbook Prune . Tomato peel is one of those scraps I never thought about and never felt particularly bad about it. They are such a small piece of tomato and it didn’t seem like such a big deal to throw them away, but now I regret every bite of tomato peel I have ever thrown away, this salt is so good.
It’s easy to turn red peels into beautiful pink salt, but you need to peel the tomato off first, which is also not that hard if you know how. Just take a paired knife, make a small cross at the bottom of the fruit, and dip it in boiling water for about 30 seconds. As soon as you see that the rind begins to separate slightly from the rest of the fruit, submerge the tomato in ice water until it cools down. The skins will slip off immediately and be ready for their salty transformation. Weigh the skins, place them on a parchment lined baking sheet, and sprinkle with an equal amount of salt by weight.
Put them in the oven at 200 degrees for a couple of hours and when they are nice, dry and crispy, crush them in a mortar and pestle . (You can use a small food processor or a spice grinder, but this fine powder won’t work.)
I am very obsessed with this. So far, I’ve sprinkled it on scrambled eggs, popcorn and cream cheese rice cake and so far, it has added both sodium and a bright fresh flavor with a touch of umami. This unexpected development has transformed red peels from “food for worms” into a precious commodity.
Food52’s Peach Flavored Sugar
Officially, this is peach season, which means it’s peach pie season now, which means you will need to peel a lot of peaches. It’s also possible that you are one of those people who just don’t like the feeling of fluff on your tongue, in which case this advice applies to your life as well.
This recipe was originally developed by Food52 reader, Rhonda35, and is as delicious as it is beautiful. The process is very similar to the tomato salt procedure – you even peel them the same way – with minor modifications. Unlike tomato peels, peach peels are dried before being mixed with sugar, but dried for the same time at the same temperature.
After drying, Rhonda chopped the peel, measured its volume and chopped it with the same amount of sugar. I added a little more sugar – about 25% more by volume – to mine to stretch the rind a little, and the result is a super-tasty peach sugar perfect for sprinkling on all sorts of sweet treats. I put it on toast, oatmeal and (again) cream cheese rice cake, and it gave each meal a distinctly springy flavor (like in season). But I’m not done yet and plan on shaking these sugar cookies, ice cream, and crumbly shoemaker filling all summer. (I also plan to try this with any stone fruit skins I can get my hands on, be it plums, nectarines, or apricots.)