Easy Pickled Green Tomatoes Recipe (Polish Style)
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This is a simple pickled green tomato recipe that follows the Polish method of slicing the fruit and infusing it with brine. The flavors in it come from sugar, allspice, onions, and bay leaves, and it’s decorated with tiny slices of sweet red pepper. This is an incredibly easy and delicious way to preserve green tomatoes after they stop ripening at the end of the season. Open a jar to serve as a winter salad, or serve it with savory dishes such as sausages, hot dogs, sandwiches, and burgers.
Green tomatoes are hard, tart, and generally overlooked as a food during the summer months. Though they’re perfectly safe to eat, you tend to let them ripen into juicy red tomatoes (or other colors). However, there tends to be a lot of green fruit left on plants after the first frost. If you don’t take them inside, then they’ll rot and be wasted. That’s why we have so many green tomato recipes!
After sharing another of my green tomato recipes a couple of years ago, I was contacted by a Polish lady who recommended making pickled green tomatoes. They’re traditional in Poland and called Prosta saÅ‚atka z zielonych pomidorów (simple green tomato salad). I was amazed to see that you can even buy it in Polish supermarkets! Imagine green tomatoes on the shelf next to pickled onions and beets. I tried the recipe she sent me and made adjustments so that it could be made with ordinary distilled vinegar. It only needs a few easy-to-find ingredients, with the main spice flavor coming from whole allspice.
Ways to Use Pickled Green Tomatoes
Pickled green tomatoes are sweet and vinegary, firm, and absolutely delicious. Traditionally, they’re used as a winter vegetable dish to be enjoyed when little fresh produce is available. To serve, you can open a pint jar and serve the vegetables as a salad with sliced red onions. Slice the red onions and soak them in cool water for ten minutes beforehand to take the sharpness off them. Make this simple salad as a perfect side dish for cooked meats and fried food or a hearty potato salad. The slices are also delicious served on burgers or sandwiches.
You could use pickled green tomatoes in other ways, though. I plan on serving them this winter alongside assortments of cheese and cured meats. Not only would they be delicious, but their pale green color would create contrast with other pickled vegetables.
Picking Green Tomatoes
Green tomatoes are unripe tomatoes that are leftover at the end of the growing season. You have to grow tomatoes to get them, and they can be a bit of a conundrum if you have a lot. Though you can take green tomatoes inside to ripen, they tend to all ripen around the same time! Then, you have to figure out what to do with a bunch of ripe tomatoes. Instead, you can ripen some and then preserve the rest for winter.
What green tomatoes have going for them is that they cook well and stay firm. Though they don’t have a great flavor raw, they are milder when cooked and pick up other flavors well. In green tomato chutney, the pieces are smaller and cook down into malt vinegar perfectly. With pickled green tomatoes, the cooking time is much less, so the thick pieces of tomatoes stay solid and have a good bite. The bay leaves in the recipe contribute flavor, but with their tannins, they also help keep the tomatoes firm.
Polish Flavors and Method
Every authentic Polish recipe for pickled green tomatoes calls for a particular type of vinegar that was not easy for me to source. In Poland, it seems that a double-strength vinegar containing 10% acetic acid is not only common but preferred. Because it’s so strong, it’s used in a lesser quantity than typical distilled vinegar, which is 5% acetic acid. If you can source Polish vinegar, I’ve included a note in the recipe card for how much to use. The main recipe uses standard white vinegar that most people can find in supermarkets.
The other thing that makes this recipe Polish is using whole allspice as the main flavoring. You cook it in the pickling liquid and ensure that a couple of them make it into each jar as well. Allspice, called ziele angielskie (English spice) in Poland, is a spice made from the unripe berries of the Jamaica pepper plant (Pimenta Dioica). Its warming and clove-like flavor is important in Jamaican cuisine, but it’s used less in other places now. It’s a must for this recipe, and if you can’t find whole allspice locally, you can get it online.
More Green Tomato Recipes
The recipe below shows you how to prepare and pickle green tomatoes. When you’re finished making it, you may have some pickling liquid left over. Don’t throw it away! Instead, slice up a cucumber and pour the brine over it. Put it in the fridge, and you’ll have a delicious and crunchy refrigerator pickle to serve as a cucumber salad. It keeps for at least a couple of weeks, if not a month.
At the end of the growing year, tomatoes tend to take a long time to ripen. Instead of seeing them as a waste, start looking at them as an exciting harvest. You can pick them to ripen inside the house or use them to make delicious food recipes and preserves. Here are some others that I can highly recommend.
- Green Tomato Chutney Recipe (for cheese and charcuterie boards)
- Green Tomato Relish Recipe (for hot dogs)
- More Green Tomato Recipes
Pickled Green Tomatoes Recipe
Equipment
- 5 wide-mouth pint jars (with 2-piece lids)
- water bath canner (or tall pot)
Ingredients
- 2.2 lbs green tomatoes (1 kg)
- 1 red bell peppers
- 2 onions (medium-size)
- 1.5 cups white vinegar (5% acidity*)
- 1.5 cups water
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 10 allspice berries
- 5 bay leaves
- 3 tsp salt
- additional spices, if desired*
Instructions
Prepare the Vegetables
- The larger the green tomatoes you use, the better, but you can use any size that you have including green cherry tomatoes. Wash and then cut the tomatoes into 1/4" (0.5 cm) slices. Add them to a large bowl.
- Thinly slice the sweet red peppers and onions and add them to the bowl, too.
Make the Brine
- Add all of the ingredients needed for the brine to a saucepan. Bring it to a boil and stir to dissolve the salt and sugar.
- Pour the scalding hot brine over the vegetables. Cover with a tea towel and leave to infuse for an hour, stirring a few times during that time.
Pack the Pickled Green Tomatoes in Jars
- With fifteen minutes to go on the infusing time, place five clean pint jars in the oven and turn it on to the lowest temperature. This is to warm the jars in preparation for water bath canning.
- Prepare the water bath canner (or tall pot) by filling it with enough water to cover the pint jars by an inch. Heat the water to simmering.
- At the end of an hour, the green tomatoes will be softened and will have started the pickling process.
- Take the warm jars from the oven and place them on the counter. Remove the bay leaves and allspice from the brine, and put one bay leaf and two allspice berries at the bottom of each jar. The bay leaves will be easier to find, but if you're having trouble with the allspice, just add them to the jars as you fill them.
- Layer the green tomatoes, onions, and red peppers in the jars, squishing them down as you go. Fill the jars to a half-inch (1 cm) of the top. Having wide-mouth jars really helps get larger slices of tomato in.
- When the jars are filled with vegetables, pour the brine over them, filling so that they have a 1-cm / half-inch headspace (headspace is the space between the top of the food and the top of the jar rim). Use a butter knife to remove any air bubbles and add more brine, if needed.
Water Bath Canning
- To make our preserves truly shelf stable, we water bath can the jars. This kills any lingering microbes on or in the jars and helps with a good seal.
- Wipe the rim of each of the jars clean, then center the lid on the jar and screw the band until finger tight. This means to screw on until you meet resistance and then give the band another good turn with your fingertips. The idea is to keep the brine from escaping but to allow air to vent from the jars during processing.
- If you're using an ordinary pot, first push a tea towel or other sturdy cloth to the bottom of the pot with a spoon. You don't want the jars sitting directly on the hot bottom surface of the pan, or they could crack. Lower the warm jars into the simmering water using a jar lifter and put a lid on the pot.
- Bring the water to a rolling boil, and then begin timing. Leave the jars in the water for fifteen minutes.
- After fifteen minutes, turn the heat off, remove the lid, and leave it to set for five minutes. Then, remove the jars using a jar lifter and set them on the counter to cool and for the lids to seal. Once cooled and sealed, the pickled green tomatoes have a one-year shelf-life if kept in a cool, dark place.
what is the uk equivalent of white vinegar–we don’t have that in the UK, at least not one that we use for cooking. we have malt vinegar, white wine vinegar, cider vinegar. malt vinegar is dark whereas both white wine and cider vinegar are clear. presumably either of these will work?
Hi James, you can use any white vinegar of your choice, as long as it contains 5% acetic acid. White malt vinegar (called distilled malt vinegar) is common in the UK and would be a good option. I get mine from Tesco but it’s common to most of the big supermarkets. You could also use white wine vinegar or even apple cider vinegar if you’d like.
I love pickled green tomatoes! For salad, halved green cherry tomatoes are really nice.