I made the mistake of discovering the chatbot TasteGPT. (I won’t link to it - no need to give it even more users, though I realise that ships already sailed).
It’s both addictive and terrifying. You can feed it a photo of a dish, with no context, and it tells you what it thinks it will taste like. I pasted in a picture of the creamed corn with pickled cucumbers I’d cooked the week before, gave it nothing else to go on, and braced for some vague food-writing clichés. I wasn’t far off:
“Fresh, creamy, tangy, nutty, and lightly spicy, with a satisfying contrast between smooth and crunchy textures. The flavour progression:
First bite: Cool cucumber and fresh herbs.
Then: Creamy, savoury, nutty base coats your palate.
Finish: Sweet charred corn, lingering garlic, lemon brightness, and a gentle chilli warmth.”
(Substack’s new AI detection tool – fantastic idea, btw - won’t like that!)
Of course chatbots have no tongue, no nose, no idea of the joy of butter melting into corn. What it does have is millions of descriptions of flavour, and an extraordinary ability to predict which sensations tend to travel together. It doesn’t know taste; it knows the language of taste.
Take the tomato, so sweet at this time of year, which tastes wildly different from one to the next.
I asked it what it thought a supermarket tomato would taste like vs a tomato picked warm off the vine in late summer.
Sparkling...nectar-like...bursting seed gel! This chatbot really loves tomatoes...
It arrived at the same conclusion as so many gardeners and growers and tomato-lovers: tomatoes are now bred to survive stacking, shipping and shelf life, accepting a lesser flavour in exchange for reliability (and reliable they are). But right now, this deep into summer - in the northern hemisphere, at least - even the supermarket tomatoes are almost sparkling.
Enough of that...I refuse to let a chatbot have the last word on tomatoes.
Eating tomatoes is very, very, very easy. Too easy, especially now they’re this good. Go and get as many as possible and do any of the following:
Grate on the coarse side of a box grater, salt, and leave to drain, using the pulp for a quick sauce or a punchy dressing, and the tomato water - often thrown away - saved and used to season noodles (like in today’s recipe)
Slice thick and layer with good olive oil, flaky salt, and whatever herb is nearby - basil most obviously, but also tarragon or marjoram
Char hard and fast in a very hot pan or under the grill until the skins blister and split, chopped into a salsa or a smoky tomato butter
A really good red sauce on pizza (and add your favourites - mine: olives and anchovies)
Slice thinly and layer with cucumber and shallot, dressed hard just before serving, so nothing has time to go soft or watery before it gets to the table
Stuff and bake whole - hollowed out, filled with rice and herbs, baked alongside their own lids
Blitz raw into a cold soup
Roast a tray of tomatoes with whole heads of garlic until soft and lightly charred, then mash the garlic and mix in good olive oil. Perfect to spoon over baked chicken or fish, piled onto burrata or ricotta, or mixed straight through pasta. A recipe we’ve written up for Simple Too
Luckily for us, the chatbot will never sit around waiting for a tomato plant to grow or eat one warm off the vine (...I hope). Until it has, I’m not sure its opinion counts for much. Here’s two recipes to celebrate the simple, delicious late summer tomato - created, tested, and tasted by people who truly know its joys.
Tomatoes are one of the most naturally umami-rich ingredients there is. The dressing here (soy, sesame, and mirin) leans hard into that. Use the best tomatoes you can find, a mix of heirloom and regular if possible, and baby or Lebanese cucumbers over regular ones, which tend to have too much water. A mandolin makes short work of the slicing. Dress just before serving.
Tomatoes at their peak need very little doing to them. Grating them - coarsely, against a box grater, skin discarded - is one of my favourite things to do: for pan con tomate or to serve as a dip with grilled bread or parathas. The tomato water that drains off is also just as good as the pulp - seasoned with orange and a little aleppo chilli here, it becomes the broth for the noodles. All of it can be done ahead and kept in the fridge, to give you easy lunches throughout the week. Udon or flat rice noodles work just as well as soba.
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