This sounds like a job for self-confessed tomato obsessive Mike Davies, who just so happens to be sitting in his mum’s garden, staring at her green, under-ripe tomatoes. “The first thing I’d say is we’re apparently getting good weather this month, so there’s a chance they’ll still ripen,” says the chef director of the Camberwell Arms in south London and author of Cooking for People. If you don’t fancy waiting, though, green tomatoes, with their high acidity and harder texture, really lend themselves to longer cooking.
For this reason, chutney is the oft-suggested solution, but fermenting is also a good shout, says Jan Ostle, head chef and co-founder of Wilsons in Bristol. “We had an entire crop of tomatoes fail last year, so we lacto-fermented them and put them in a brine of 2% of the total weight. It’s been a joy working our way through them this year.”
