Sweet Tomato Salad
A dessert salad for fans of unusual combinations. As we all know, salads come in many kinds — including sweet ones. Dessert salads usually feature fruit or berries, but you can make a sweet salad with tomatoes too. The key here is choosing a sweet sauce that pairs harmoniously with the vegetable. This salad is an acquired taste — not everyone will love it — but it's worth making to find out. It's best to experiment during the summer, in the season of homegrown tomatoes.
Cooking method
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Step 1:
Gather the ingredients for the sweet tomato salad. For this salad it's best to use good-quality, ripe, fleshy tomatoes — homegrown if possible. The "Beefsteak" (Bull's Heart) variety works well. Use pre-shelled sunflower seeds. For the pear, a "Conference" or another soft variety works; I'm using homegrown pears.
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Step 2:
First, make the sweet seed sauce. Rinse the shelled seeds, cover them with water, and leave them for a few hours. Then drain the water.
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Step 3:
Wash and dry the pears. Peel them and remove the core and stem. Cut into cubes.
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Step 4:
Put the diced pear, soaked sunflower seeds (drained), apple cider vinegar, and honey into a blender. Purée until pasty.
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Step 5:
The sauce is ready. The seeds make it very filling, and the honey makes it sweet.
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Step 6:
The end result isn't a very photogenic salad, so to make it at least somewhat photographable, I sliced the tomatoes into rounds. For everyday personal use, cut the tomatoes however you like. Put the sliced tomatoes in a salad bowl, dress with the seed sauce, toss, and serve.
- A fun fact: in Korea, tomatoes are considered a fruit (and not long ago the European Union classified them as fruit too). It's common to eat them with milk or sugar, and you'll often find cakes decorated with tomatoes — not always cherry tomatoes, but ordinary ones. They say there was tomato ice cream in the USSR, but few remember it, since by all accounts it wasn't tasty and wasn't made for long. In Europe and America, that kind of ice cream still exists today. Maybe no one will remember the ice cream, but many will recall eating tomatoes with just sugar as kids — so a sweet tomato salad isn't really news.
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Tomatoes - 23 kcal/100g
- Pear - 42 kcal/100g
- Dried pear - 246 kcal/100g
- Canned pears - 76 kcal/100g
- Honey - 400 kcal/100g
- Dried whole safflower seed kernels - 615 kcal/100g
- Sunflower seeds - 560 kcal/100g
- Apple cider vinegar - 14 kcal/100g
