Super Simple Green Tomato Chutney

What do you do with all those left over green tomatoes? Green tomato chutney of course!

It’s been the best tomato harvest I’ve ever had, and that’s saying something as I’ve been growing tomatoes longer than any other crop.

By September I already knew this was the best harvest I’d ever had, but October just kept on giving. More tomato salads; the fruit bowl with a constant supply of cherry sized tomatoes to snack on; and even more tomato sauce for the freezer.

As we slipped into November they just kept on ripening. This is now the second November that I’ve had ripe tomatoes, last year though the supply had dipped in mid-summer with the heat wave, meaning it wasn’t such a good year overall.

Last week I finally gave in, deciding that with the constant rain, causing such dark days it meant that the last tomatoes didn’t stand much chance of ripening. It was time to make chutney and it couldn’t be easier!

Preserving precious harvests

Years ago before I had a greenhouse and grew my tomatoes outside, I always ended up with many green fruits. This resulted in me making green tomato chutney every year, and quite a bit at that.

Received wisdom is, that your green tomato chutney will last up to a year, unopened in a cool dark place, but the best I’ve ever tasted, I found at the back of a shelf in our old garage and it was three years old!

Go with the common sense adage, if it looks ok (no mould), smells ok (doesn’t make you recoil) and tastes ok (you’d know if it was off), then it’s more than likely perfectly edible, no matter how old.

Nowadays we forget the point of chutney. At a time before refrigeration it was made out of necessity, as a way of preserving the glut from the summer harvest to sustain you through winter and beyond.

With green tomato chutney it’s a combination of preserving food for winter, but also a way of using produce that otherwise is inedible, or that’s what we’ve been told.

Are Green Tomatoes good or bad for you?

In this day and age of over precaution, I shall share with you that green tomatoes do contain the toxins solanine and tomatidine, they are both poisonous in large doses, but you would have to consume rather a lot of chutney to cause any harm.

In actual fact, red tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and aubergines also contain the same toxins but in much lower levels. This is because they all belong to the nightshade family. Yes, think deadly nightshade!

On the flip side they have just as much vitamin C as ripe tomatoes and recently the toxin tomatidine has been found to actually prevent muscle wasting and furthermore actually promotes muscle growth.

I don’t think you can go too far wrong with ‘everything in moderation’! Health and safety warning over.

Green Tomato Chutney Recipe

As well as gathering the food ingredients together, you will need a large pan, wooden spoon and some sterilised jam jars.

I recycle old jam and honey jars using them again and again. When the lids get a little corroded I just make some grease proof paper discs to go on top of the jar before you screw the lid on.

If you put the lids on immediately after filling the jars with the piping hot chutney, it will form an excellent seal.

Collect wash and dry your green tomatoes.