Fried Green Tomatoes

During high summer I love using juicy, perfectly ripe red tomatoes raw in salads, caprese, tomato and mayo sandwiches, and—my summertime essential—gazpacho. But equally satisfying in its own way is the challenge of extending tomato season on the front and back end by using unripened green tomatoes in that Southern classic fried green tomatoes.

I grew up in North Carolina, where crispy cornmeal-battered fried green tomatoes are a star of the spring and fall tomato shoulder season, but I didn't fully appreciate this brilliant use for under-ripe tomatoes until about 10 years ago when I had a rooftop vegetable garden in Brooklyn and was faced with a late-fall harvest that was just never going to ripen on the vine.

Instead of composting the green tomatoes, I battered them in cornmeal and fried them in a cast iron skillet until they were golden and crispy and perfect for eating as-is, dipping in rémoulade, and tucking into sandwiches with pimento cheese (inspired by a melt at Elsie's Plate and Pie in Baton Rouge). Fried green tomatoes really are one of the best ways to turn trash (or compost) into treasure.

It's been several years since I've had a rooftop tomato garden so fried green tomatoes had unfortunately fallen off my culinary radar until recently. Now they've blasted back to the top of my summer and shoulder season must-eat list, thanks to the recipe we're sharing here for cornmeal-battered fried green tomatoes, which was developed by our Alabama-based test kitchen colleague Jasmine Smith. Jasmine tested round after round of tomatoes to develop perfectly crispy, golden brown fried green tomatoes. And when I say crispy, I mean it: I tried these tomatoes fresh out of the fryer and then again after they'd been sitting for a couple of hours and they were miraculously still crunchy. What sorcery is this? (Actually it's science.)

Read on for Jasmine's full recipe for the tomatoes and a tangy and creamy rémoulade sauce for dipping, plus serving ideas. 

7 Tips for Fried Green Tomatoes That Are Perfectly Crispy and Delicious

To create this recipe, Jasmine experimented with different combinations of breadcrumbs and cornmeal for the coating, salted vs. unsalted tomatoes, tomatoes that were soaked in buttermilk vs. unsoaked tomatoes, and various thicknesses of tomato slices. Her resulting recipe reflects the findings from her testing described here. 

Choose the right tomatoes. The tomatoes you want for fried green tomatoes are unripe tomatoes—that is the kind that would turn red given the time on the vine in the sun and warmth. Do not use the kind of tomatoes that remain green when they're ripe, such as green zebras. These will be too soft to batter and fry properly. Also avoid underripe supermarket tomatoes, which, while not in any way ideal as a peak-season summer tomato, are still too ripe to work as a fried green tomato.

Slice the tomatoes to the right thickness. Jasmine found that tomatoes that are cut no thicker than 1/4 inch are best, since the batter cracked and fell off tomatoes that are sliced wider than that.

Don't salt the tomatoes. Salting tomatoes can help draw out excess liquid, but Jasmine found that when the tomato slices are 1/4 inch or thinner, they didn't benefit from a pre-salting: The well-seasoned coating is more than enough for the thinner slices of tomato within and the thinner slices aren't holding enough water to risk sogging out the crust after frying. (It's worth noting she did find pre-salting helpful for thicker slices of tomatoes, both for seasoning and a liquid purge, but those thicker tomatoes suffered much more from the coating crumbling off.)

Dredge with flour and an egg-buttermilk mixture. Jasmine experimented with a variety of dredging methods, including with and without a light coating of all-purpose flour, and with a dunk in an egg wash, a buttermilk bath, and a mixture of both. She found that the best result came from the flour dredge combined with a subsequent dunk in a buttermilk-egg mixture, which creates a crust that's less likely to crumble than one built on buttermilk alone, but more flavorful than one that only uses egg, thanks to the mild lactic tang of the buttermilk.

Use an equal-parts combo of cornmeal and breadcrumbs. Cornmeal is traditional (and delicious) in the coating for fried green tomatoes, but cutting it with an equal volume of standard breadcrumbs results in the crispiest, most evenly browned fried green tomatoes. The breadcrumbs enhance the crisp texture and evenly browned color of the fried tomatoes without creating an overly tough shell.

Note that panko is not a good option here: Jasmine tested the mixture with panko in place of the standard breadcrumbs, but their larger crumb size didn't brown as evenly relative to the other coating components.

Press the coating onto the tomatoes. Be sure to press the tomatoes into the flour-cornmeal mixture so it adheres well. It's a small detail that pays dividends by helping the coating stay affixed when you put the tomatoes in the fryer.

Add flavor throughout. Green tomatoes are pretty mild on their own, so this recipe incorporates flavor boosters such as buttermilk in the batter and Creole seasoning in both the rémoulade and the cornmeal mixture. True Southern flavor means plenty of flavor, so don't skimp on the seasonings.  

7 Ideas for Serving Fried Green Tomatoes

• Dipped in rémoulade, ranch dressing, or another creamy sauce.
• In place of regular tomatoes in a BLT or tomato and mayo sandwich.
• Slathered with pimento cheese.
• Topped with fried eggs for breakfast or brunch. 
• As a side with barbecued chicken.
• On a veggie plate with black-eyed peas and succotash. 
• With burrata and fresh basil.