The Best Green Tomato Recipes

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Delicious green tomato recipes, including preserves, appetizers, salsa, pie, cake, and traditional fried green tomatoes. Though they’re unripe, you can use these end-of-season fruits in a wide variety of dishes! You can also bring them inside to ripen, and tips on how to do that are included here, too.

You’re probably here because you have a glut of green tomatoes. Your plants may have been knocked down, affected by blight, or it may simply be the end of the season. No matter the reason, I have a solution! You can encourage them to ripen fully, but they’re also a fantastic ingredient for cooking. They have crispness and body that lend themselves to hearty dishes and preserves, and you can even eat them raw.

One thing to address before we continue, though. Unlike what other sources say, green tomatoes don’t contain solanine, the alkaloid found in green potatoes. According to Dr. Mendel Friedman of the federal Department of Agriculture, this is a “chemical gaff e” perpetrated by government sources and mom-and-pop blogs alike. So dig in and enjoy this collection of the best green tomato recipes on the web.

What are Green Tomatoes

Most tomato varieties ripen to red, orange, yellow, and even purple, but a few stay green when ripe. They include Green Zebra, Emerald Apple, and Green Pear and taste just as great as their more vibrant cousins. However, when we speak about green tomatoes, we tend to mean something else.

For these recipes, green tomatoes are unripe tomatoes.

Green tomatoes are unripe tomatoes that tend to be green, hard, and sour. They’re also perfectly edible and delicious in many creative recipes—we’ll get to those in a moment. If you grow tomatoes, you’ll sometimes have loads of them and have the challenge of figuring out what to do with them. Usually, this happens towards the end of the growing season, when temperatures drop, and tomatoes stop ripening outdoors.

How to Ripen Green Tomatoes

Although green tomatoes are great for cooking, they’re also easy to ripen if you’d prefer. Unripe tomatoes will ripen if kept at a consistent 68-77°F (20-25°C). They don’t need to be attached to the plant, either, and they don’t need light, watering, or extra nutrients. If you wait until the fruit has a little color, it’ll ripen to the same delicious flavor it has on the plant. This is called the breaker stage.

Ripen green tomatoes by placing them in a single layer in a box in a warm room. They'll soon turn red. — I ripen my heirloom tomatoes in cardboard boxes in the house.

Fully green fruit can ripen, too, but they might not achieve that same intense flavor. To r ipen green tomatoes, bring them indoors and place them in a single layer at the bottom of a cardboard box. Keep them at a warm temp and out of direct sunlight, and they’ll change from green and hard to ripe and juicy in just a matter of days. It’s simple.

When you use green tomatoes in recipes, they add body, crunch, and zing but don’t have as much umami flavor as ripe tomatoes. If you’ve ever had tomatillos, they have a similar texture and flavor. When you’re cooking with green tomatoes in savory dishes, use other ingredients, such as malt vinegar and soy sauce, to bring umami to the table. Otherwise, you can use them to bulk up recipes ranging from chutney to cake. My hands-down favorite way to use them is in green tomato chutney.

Three jars of fully processed crushed tomatoes. You can see a single basil leaf through the glass of the middle one. — If you have fully ripe fruit, try preserving it as canned crushed tomatoes.

If you’re going to make one recipe, though, you should try fried green tomatoes. They’re wickedly delicious and not difficult to make! You cut large green tomatoes into quarter-inch slices and marinate them in buttermilk, salt, pepper, and other spices. Then dredge them in all-purpose flour, an egg mixture, and a breadcrumb mixture, and fry them in a pan of hot vegetable oil until golden brown. Drain on paper towels and enjoy with remoulade sauce for an authentic Southern experience.