Vegan Fried Green Tomatoes

A long time ago, longer than even last Friday even, perhaps as long ago to include decades in the equation, I was a young girl with a desire to cook.  To understand why this spice made a better choice than that spice, how butter made everything just taste better, and how to make a checkerboard cake.

As luck would have it, (is there luck or is it just life?), I was a student at a very small private school in Easton, Maryland.  The same very small private school where E landed after her parents decided that a life in Easton may be better than their life in Philadelphia.

E and I became fast and furious best friends (and we are, honestly, still the very best of friends now, 35 years later) and it wasn’t long before I was invited, by written invitation, to spend the weekend with her family at their home.  I learned quickly that E’s mother, C, was a truly fabulous cook.  Of course she had taught cooking school, so there was that.  But her generosity and love in the kitchen infused her food with a identifiable and delectable goodness.

It was C that taught me so very much about embracing whole foods, embracing the goodness of the very best and freshest of ingredients, of using all of my senses, not just my taste buds, to create memorable meals.

It was also C that taught me how to make the very best fried green tomatoes.   It was standing next to her, at her restaurant worthy 8 burner stove, that I learned to make a proper egg wash for the tomatoes and to shake them carefully in the cornmeal and flour mixture.  How to fry them in more butter than even Julia Child might find reasonable, checking carefully for just the right amount of pink tenderness before removing them to the ever growing pile of goodness kept warm in the oven.

But it was also C who taught me that no plate of Fried Green Tomatoes is truly complete without a proper creamy sauce created from a mixture of the droppings in the heavy frying pan, cream and, oh yes, a tad more butter.

This was the food of my childhood.  I can not remember a summer where those green tomatoes and heavenly sauce did not grace my plate countless times along with fresh corn on the cob and dozens of hard shell crabs.

All of that, obviously, was long before I became a vegetarian and certainly before I became a vegan.  It has since becoming a vegan that I’ve most missed the summer Fried Green Tomatoes in my life.  It just did not seem plausible to me, truthfully, to be able to create a vegan version that would even come close to the memorable bites of my childhood.

Reading about others vegan versions of Fried Green tomatoes made my mouth water, however.  Last week the farmers market happened to be overflowing with organic green tomatoes and though I could hear C, in my head, clucking about the lack of butter and cream, the ache for that particular deliciousness of summer from my early childhood meant that I just had to give it a go.

I’ve noticed other vegan recipes for Fried Green Tomatoes around the web, but some of them included using egg beaters (I personally just do not like egg beaters) for the egg wash or suggested using Earth Balance as the “butter”.  Again, I have nothing against Earth Balance, I just don’t particularly like it.

So I set out, as I often do, to create my own vegan version of the taste of childhood summers.

Here it is:

Vegan Fried Green Tomatoes

• 6 large green tomatoes
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup corn meal
• 1 ½ cups soy milk
• 1 ½ teaspoons sea salt
• 1 ½ teaspoons freshly ground pepper
• 2 -3 fresh garlic gloves finely chopped
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil

For the Sauce:

• ½ cup finely ground cashews
• ½ cup soy milk
• ½ cup water
• 4 tablespoons nutritional yeast.
• ½ cup white wine
• salt and pepper to taste

You’ll need a very heavy frying pan.  I have always used a cast iron frying pan for this and I can’t imagine ever using anything else as it just absorbs flavors and conducts heat so very well, but that’s just me.

Slice your tomatoes very into rather thick even slices.  Sift together into a flat pan or plate the flour, cornmeal, one teaspoon salt and one teaspoon pepper.  In a bowl,  mix the soy milk with the remaining ½ teaspoon of salt and pepper.  This is your “wash”.

Over medium heat, add enough olive oil to your frying pan to coat the bottom.  Do not have the heat so high that it starts to smoke, you don’t want that.  Add a bit of the chopped garlic (not all as you’ll want to reserve some to continue to add) to flavour the oil.

Dip a tomato slice in the soy milk to completely coat and then coat with the flour mixture.  Drop into the frying pan.  Continue to do this until you have five or six slices in the pan (it will depend on the size of your tomatoes how many slices you can fit, but they should lay flat and not overlap).  Fry on one side, then the other.  One way to tell if they’re “done” is that they will feel tender to touch, rather than hard, when you poke a fork in the center.  Both sides should be golden.

You may find that you need to add more olive oil as you go along. When you do, add more garlic to flavor it the oil.

Continue with this method until you’ve cooked all slices.  I like to keep the cooked ones on a cookie tray in a 250 degree oven so they stay warm.  Others like to just pile them on a plate.  Do whatever works best for you.

Once they’re all cooked, it’s time to make the sauce.

Scrape the droppings in the pan to the center.  You’re keeping these as they add a nice flavour to the sauce.  Your heat should now be a tad lower than where you cooked the tomatoes.  Perhaps at Medium/Low.  Now add the soy milk  and water and nutritional yeast.   Things will get quite bubbly.  Continue stirring, using a wooden spatula, and scraping the bottom as you do.  Stir in the ground cashews.  Continue to stir as it will now start to thicken rather quickly.  Add in the white wine.  Continue to stir.  Taste for salt and pepper.

To serve, place four or five tomato slices on a plate and cover with the sauce.

Fasten your seat belt, take a bite, and blast yourself right back to your childhood.  Or just eat them and enjoy.  Every bite is a savory joy.

Music for cooking: Unrequited by Louden Wainwright, III.    Just right for sparking those good old childhood memories of life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.