The last salsa cruda of summer

Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta makes a fresh light meal or an impressive side. Recipe below.

A quick note before I get started: Check out Kitchen Notes at the bottom to see how Marion adapted her delicious Plum Cake with pears as the prune plums disappeared from store shelves for the season. But read this post first—no dessert ’til you’ve finished.

We didn’t have a garden this year. What with our move and everything, it just didn’t happen. So for the first time in years, we didn’t have tomatoes and basil and rosemary and a host of other goodies straight from our yard.

But at the farmers markets, the produce stands, even the grocery stores, you can see the season changing. Some summer staples are disappearing, and those that remain just don’t seem the same. The peaches that I reveled in for the first time in years are now sometimes being a little more iffy. And tomatoes, though still plentiful, aren’t the deep, robust red found just a week or so ago.

If you’re lucky enough to be harvesting your own tomatoes and basil—or if, like us, you do all your harvesting retail—here’s a quick, delicious way to make use of some of summer’s remaining bounty.

Both Italian and Mexican cooks lay claim to the term salsa cruda, with very different meanings. For both, salsa cruda means uncooked sauce. But Mexican salsa cruda is, well, an uncooked salsa—salsa verde is one example. [Oh, and by the way: Show of hands, who doesn’t know that salsa has replaced ketchup as the number one condiment in America? That says something cool about the American palate, I think!]

For Italians, salsa cruda is truly an uncooked sauce, most often to be served over pasta. The only thing you cook is the pasta itself. When you toss it with the salsa, the pasta cools down a little and the salsa heats up a little, creating a light late summer/early autumn meal. A month or so ago, I posted one of my favorite Italian salsa crudas, Pasta Shells with Italian Tuna and Artichokes. This one is even simpler.

Tomatoes are the star of this dish, and straight from the garden is best, of course. I didn’t even think of tomatoes as more than an ingredient in sauces or ketchup until I tasted one Marion had grown in our backyard in St. Louis. Suddenly, I understood what the big deal was.

Store-bought tomatoes are getting better, though. More varieties, better quality—I even saw heirloom tomatoes on a recent Whole Foods visit. Our go to tomatoes at the store these days [not counting grape or cherry tomatoes] are tomatoes on the vine—sold, as the name implies, still attached to the vine. I have to admit, the first time I saw this, I assumed it was just another marketing ploy to separate foodies from their money: Tomatoes sold on the vine command a considerably higher price than their plucked brethren.

But it turns out the vine really does make a difference. It continues to supply nutrients to the fruit, even after harvesting, naturally ripening them and producing firmer, juicier, better tasting, more nutritious tomatoes. How much the actual stem adds to the party isn’t fully understood, but that’s only part of the story. They tend to be better varieties to begin with, and receive gentler handling in harvesting and shipping to keep them attached.

Handle with care. Here are a couple of quick tips on keeping tomatoes and getting the most flavor out of them. First, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never refrigerate tomatoes. As in never. That is the quickest way known to man to rob them of flavor. Also never, never, etcetera place them upside down, resting on their “shoulders”—the raised, well, shoulders around where the stem attaches. All that pressure concentrated on those small points is a perfect way to bruise them and promote rotting. Place them right side up, on their bottoms.

Whatever tomatoes you use—homegrown or store-bought of any variety, including plum tomatoes—this simple, flavorful treatment makes for a light meal on its own or a fabulous side that will vie for attention with a seared chop or other main course.

Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta
Serves 2

2 cups tomatoes, seeded and roughly diced [about 3 small]
1 small to medium clove garlic, minced [see Kitchen Notes]
1/4 cup [packed] basil, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt, freshly ground pepper to taste

6 to 8 ounces uncooked pasta [I used linguine]

Start a large pot of water to cook pasta. While water heats, prep and combine tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil in a large bowl and gently stir to combine. You can seed or not seed the tomatoes, but not doing so adds more moisture to the finished dish, making it kind of soupy. Set aside to let the flavors combine. DO NOT ADD SALT at this point. Salt leeches liquid from cut tomatoes and will create a soupy mess of a sauce.

Salt boiling water generously and cook pasta according to package directions. I like long pastas for this dish—spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine—but you can really use any pasta you like. Shells, farfalle or penne would play nicely too. Cappellini [angel hair pasta] may be a little on the fragile side for all the tossing you need to do.

Drain pasta and add to bowl with salsa cruda mixture. Start by adding maybe 2/3 of the cooked pasta, add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste and toss to combine. If the mixture looks like it could use more pasta, add accordingly and toss to combine. Now that you’re adding salt, be generous with it. You’re working with non-processed ingredients, so you don’t have to worry about hidden sodium, and salt really brings out the flavor of the ingredients. Be generous with the pepper too, just because.

Divide between two pasta bowls and serve. If you’re using long pasta, use tongs to transfer to bowls. You will mainly get pasta, which is actually a good thing. Then you’re left with mainly the tomato mixture to spoon on top. Beautiful!

Kitchen Notes

Basil and Weekend Herb Blogging. Yeah, I know. Every time I cook with an herb, I declare it a favorite. Well, basil is one of my favorite favorites, so I’m including this post in Weekend Herb Blogging. This week, it’s being hosted by Myriam over at Once Upon a Tart. She’s all the way over in Zurich, Switzerland, so you’ll have to speak up [the Internet’s kind of like long distance, isn’t it?]. And be sure to check out her complete round-up on Monday, September 24.

Garlic—sliced or minced? There are a couple of ways to add garlic to this dish. Mincing is the most straightforward. One small-to-medium clove does the job for me, since you don’t cook it [garlic loses its intensity the longer it cooks]. Follow your taste buds, though—add more or less depending on how much you like [and more important, how long you’re willing to continue tasting garlic after your meal].

Sometimes, when we’re making the salsa at least 45 minutes to an hour before we want to eat it, we’ll slice two cloves of garlic thinly and COUNT THE SLICES, then toss them with the tomatoes and other ingredients. Then, before adding the pasta, we’ll go through the salsa and fish out ALL the slices of garlic. This imparts the garlic taste to the dish, albeit with more subtlety. This might be a good approach if any diners are less enthusiastic garlic fans.

They have no prune plums? Let them eat pear cake! In her original post here, Marion said the recipe lends itself to other fruits as well. She proved it beautifully this weekend with this wonderful pear cake. She started by substituting chopped pears for the plums, then added a teaspoon of ground ginger to the mix. Everything else follows the original recipe.

Also this week in Blue Kitchen

What do a cooking rodent and a singing mobile phone salesman have in common? Listen up and find out, at What’s on the kitchen boombox?

Thaw for three days. Serves 158. A sort of food-related story, at WTF? Random food for thought.