Summary: Francis Lam has a confession: He doesn’t like to can. The Gilt Taste editor may spend his days touting the glories of caramelized watermelon salad and chatting about food and culture with chef Eddie Huang, but a home canner he is not. “I can’t tell if I should admit to not doing it because … it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, you’re a food person, you’re supposed to be canning and preserving,’” said Lam, who added that he probably only goes through the old timey process once every three years. That’s not to say Lam isn’t willing to put in a significant amount of work in order to squirrel away tomatoes in some form for the winter. He just prefers to spend his hours slaving over a hot stove to make tomato paste. But his aversion to canning may stem from more sartorial origins. “I think that [canning] is great, absolutely,” Lam said. “But the whole standing over the stove with the sweat and the steam and, like, I don’t own gingham, like it’s not really my speed.” Wardrobe concerns aside, though, why spend the same amount of effort to make tomato paste? Lam recently wrote that his girlfriend’s reaction to his endeavor was, “Congratulations! You just made tomato paste. It’s cheap and comes in cans.” Lam said it all comes down to taste. Forget the sad, sour flavor of canned tomato paste. In fact, he doesn’t even consider the end result to be tomato paste at all. Instead, he refers to it as “tomato concentrate.” The difference begins in the technique, which was drawn from Lam’s experience making sofrito in culinary school. “The chef [in culinary school] said, ‘you know, really take the time to cook this down, and what you want to do is make it almost like a jam,’” he recalled. “The idea of turning it into a jam really stuck in my head, like that level of concentration.” (Photo: Francis Lam/Molly Wizenberg) That means cooking the tomatoes with olive oil, which adds to the flavor of the final product. “I started [using oil] to help it along, get a little more heat, and help it start cooking,” Lam explained. “But what that does, too, is it emulsifies back into the tomato, and it gives it this real round richness in the flavor, and it kind of tames the edges if it’s a little sour.” As they slowly cook, Lam said to expect the concoction to start to look like a slippery, bubbly mess. But eventually the sugar in the tomatoes will caramelize and the color will begin to darken. “[There is] not just this sort of one-note sweetness but it gets more complex and it gets darker,” he said. “And I think those two things really make this taste so much different than tomato paste you would just buy.” For those who shy away from three hours slaving over the stove for any reason, Lam does offer an alternative: Dried tomatoes. “The really nice thing about making it yourself is that it takes basically no work, and you can really control how dry you want it,” he said. “I think that makes a huge difference.” Similar to how he insists his tomato concentrate is a world apart from canned tomato paste, Lam maintains that homemade oven-dried tomatoes are a far cry from the chewy, oily sun-dried tomatoes found in so many supermarkets. In fact, Lam hates sundried tomatoes so much that he referred to their popularity in the ‘80s as “Red Dawn: The Sundried Tomato Invasion.” While he allows that there may be some acceptable specimens out there, for the most part, “they’re kind of nasty, like often they’re really chewy and, again, really sour.” So it’s important to make the distinction that what he makes at home is not that. The process just involved slicing up tomatoes, arranging them on a sheet tray or silicone baking mat, and then letting them shrivel away in an oven on very low heat — “really low, 200 or 250,” said Lam. The resulting dried tomatoes make for a snack in and of themselves, or can be a flavorful addition to sandwiches. “I do actually like to do something, like mix it in with eggplant,” Lam said. “[I] cook eggplant down for a long time until it almost basicall
