Green Tomato Chutney

Today's blog is a long one with lots of pictures, but I am VERY excited about it so that is my excuse and I am sticking with it.

Let me set the scene first. My outside tomatoes, after a slow start, have over the last few weeks become very fruitful indeed. As I showed in the last but one blog post to this, I had well over one hundred fruits growing. Combine this with the fact that I am moving out of this house in a few weeks and I found myself with a massive amount of green tomatoes and no chance to leave them long enough that they may have ripened.

So, obviously, I decided to make some Green Tomato Chutney with them, combining the tomatoes with onions grown in the garden too.

I did a quick search and found the following recipe which I followed closely: Gran's Green Tomato Chutney

Without any further ado, then, let the picture diary begin.

The harvest of green tomatoes, with a couple of ripe ones (which are now sitting in the fridge waiting to be eaten some other way)

A couple of odd shaped tomatoes I found. These did end up in the chutney, but I found them interesting enough to show you. Aren't I nice

Weighing the tomato harvest. Yes, that is more than two kilograms of tomatoes (and I didn't pick quite every one)

That is what 2.16KG of green tomatoes look like

Weighing the home grown onions

I had to pull some of these in the dark and rain, as I did not have enough previously pulled onions to keep the ratios the same.

An onion about to be chopped

The same onion, chopped.

All of the onions chopped and set to one side

If you thought that was a lot of chopping, this is the first of the tomatoes I had to process..

... and all the tomatoes sliced, about an hour later with no breaks. The acid from chopping the onions (which were so strong my eyes were streaming) and these tomatoes actually made my fingers slightly sore.

The onions and tomatoes mixed together, with the salt already added, which will help the juice to be extracted, and improve the flavour (apparently)

Covered and ready to be left for 24 hours to mature.

All the above pictures were the process taken on the first evening of chutney making. I spent about 2 hours or so chopping and mixing.

The next evening the following happened.

Vinegar, sugar and raisins coming to the boil

I had decided to make a section of the batch with chillis in, so this is my chilli chopped and ready to be added to the smaller pan.

This is the tomato and onion mix after sitting for 24 hours...

... and this is most of the fluid which came out of the mix over night.

Adding the majority of the mix to the large pan ready to reduce

Stirring the chillis into the smaller pan, to make a chutney with bite

White pepper added to the chutney and stirred in before boiling

About an hour into the boiling process, the chutney is starting to turn golden brown and reduce down well

The chutney with chillis in it after reduction. This took about 1.5 hours of boiling as it was a slightly smaller amount to reduce than if you were boiling it all down in one big pan. I left the other bigger pan for another 30 mins or so

The jars ready for the chilli chutney, having been sat in the oven at 140 degrees for about 40 mins to sterilise them.

And the jars full of chutney. I had none left over out of that batch after filling these two jars, so that may give you an idea of just how much it does reduce down.

The nine small jars of normal green tomato chutney that were the product of the large pan. It is amazing how little is actually made, though these should last a while.

And finally the cling-filmed jars. I am SO rubbish at cling film, I almost wrapped myself up while trying to do this! Cling film is such a strange strange thing!

So, there you are. After a long time not blogged, I have posted a super long update for your delectation :)

Thanks for reading.