What To Do With Green Tomatoes—Including Recipes!

If your green tomatoes never turned red, all is not lost! Green tomatoes can often be ripened indoors—or made into delicious recipes. We’ll show you how to do both—including recipes for fried green tomatoes, salsa, chutney, relish, and more. 

Harvesting Green Tomatoes

Let’s start with the gardeners who are harvesting the tomatoes. After months of nurturing your tomato plants, it can be disheartening to have lots of unripe fruits that need harvesting before the weather turns or blight strikes. But there’s no point leaving them on the plant if frost is pending or they’re no longer ripening on the vine. If you’re completely done for the year, cut down the entire vine, but be gentle in handling the fruits. 

The next step is to check through our haul of fruits. Any fruits showing signs of blight damage should be removed and discarded. They won’t keep and won’t make good eating either. Any fruits that are simply damaged should be set aside for immediate use.

Now separate your healthy, clean tomatoes into two piles.

1. Tomatoes showing any hint of color, usually at the blossom end of the fruit, have a good chance of ripening indoors off the vine. Full-sized, darker green fruits may also ripen but will take a little longer—up to several weeks.
2. Our second pile of tomatoes is paler green. Since there’s little chance of them ripening to maturity, we’ll use them in some green tomato recipes later. 

How to Ripen Green Tomatoes  

So, how do you ripen tomatoes without them being attached to the plant? One of the simplest ways to do this is to place them in a paper bag or lidded cardboard box along with a ripe banana. Most ripe fruits give off ethylene gas, which speeds the ripening of nearby fruits, and bananas are especially good at emitting ethylene. It’s a common misconception that tomatoes need sunlight to ripen – it’s actually warmth that does the trick!

Fruits already showing some color will ripen just fine if left on the countertop at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. But again, adding that banana will help to speed things up.

If you have lots of green tomatoes, you can stagger ripening by keeping the bulk of your underripe tomatoes in a cool, dark, and – crucially – dry place to reduce the risk of them going moldy. Aim for a temperature of around 50 to 55 Fahrenheit, or 10-13 Celsius, and then, when you need them, bring them up to room temperature to ripen up.

Check out our video on ripening green tomatoes for more tips.

Our Favorite Green Tomato Recipes

Fried-Green Tomatoes

That’s our ripening hopefuls sorted. Now, onto using up our other green tomatoes, starting with a Southern soul food classic: fried green tomatoes. These firm, underripe tomatoes are perfect for this as they’ll hold their shape when fried.

Let’s get cooking! Start with three bowls: one filled with a quarter cup or around 30 grams of plain or all-purpose flour, one with two beaten eggs, and the third with another quarter cup of flour mixed with a half cup or 65 grams of cornmeal. If you can’t find cornmeal, polenta will do, and I like to add a good pinch of cayenne pepper to this mix for a spicy kick.

Prepare the tomatoes – this recipe uses three or four standard-sized fruits. Slice them into quarter-inch or half-centimeter-thick slices, then season both sides with salt and pepper.

Now the fun part! Dust each slice in the flour, shake off the excess, then dip it into the egg. Allow any excess to drip off, then coat in the cornmeal mix. Repeat for each slice, keeping one hand for the dry coatings, and the other for the wet.

Pour a quarter-inch or half-centimeter layer of oil into a frying pan or heavy-bottomed skillet. Heat the oil up so it’s nice and hot, then lay the tomato slices into the oil. Fry till the undersides are golden brown, then flip them over to fry off the topside. Each side should take a couple of minutes. Fry in a single layer, in batches, and remove the fried slices onto a paper towel-lined plate to soak up the excess oil. Enjoy your crunchy fried green tomatoes with a hot sauce, salsa, or as an accompaniment to other fried meats or shrimp. Just yum!

See the Southern Fried Green Tomatoes recipe.

Green Tomato Chutney 

How about something besides frying? Green tomato chutney is an old English classic. Pop it onto crackers, serve with cheeses, dollop it onto curries, or give it away as the perfect home-grown gift! It’s simple to make because all the ingredients are boiled together in a single, heavy-bottomed saucepan or stockpot.

And here are the ingredients: 4 cups or approximately one liter of chopped green tomatoes, a diced green pepper, 2 chopped-up apples or pears, an optional hot chili pepper, chopped, one medium diced onion, 3 cloves of minced garlic, 2 tablespoons of fresh ginger, minced, the rind and juice of one large lemon, half a cup or 120ml of white or rice wine vinegar, half a cup or 120ml of sugar, a half teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of coriander seeds, 2 teaspoons of mustard seeds, and – almost there! – a quarter teaspoon each of cinnamon, allspice, and turmeric. 

Warm it all up on medium to high heat, stirring continuously until it comes to a boil. Once it does, turn down the heat to low and simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour until the chutney’s reduced to a pleasingly thick consistency. Don’t forget to stir it from time to time so it doesn’t stick, especially as it thickens. Spoon the chutney into hot, sterilized jars and leave to cool. Keep the chutney in the refrigerator for up to two weeks or, to extend its lifespan by up to two years, process it in a water bath. See our guide on water bath canning if you’ve never done it before.

Green Tomato Salsa

A similar recipe is for green tomato salsa. Here’s a simple and fresh-tasting recipe! It’s so delicious with chips, added to a BLT or quesadilla, served with catfish or meat, over a roasted sweet potato, with buttered cornbread, or atop cream cheese and crackers.

See out Green Tomato Salsa Recipe.

Green Tomato Relish

Consider using your green tomatoes in chowchow or piccalilli, basically, relishes consisting of cabbage, green tomatoes, and a whole variety of fresh vegetables. Excellent on burgers and with baked beans. These were great depression recipes where everything was used for something, and meals could be far between. See our Green Tomato Relish recipe. 

Piccalilli Recipe

Piccalilli is a pickled relish made of a mixture of minced vegetables seasoned with vinegar, salt, and pickling spices. It’s great for burgers, brats, and sandwiches! See Piccalilli recipe.

Speaking of sandwiches, you can always just cut up a tangy green tomato for your sandwiches! We like fig jam; some folks just enjoy mayo.

Do you have any green tomato recipes? We’d welcome more ideas! Please share the recipe in the comments below for our Almanac readers!