Recipe: heirloom tomatoes and cucumber with lemon sorbet
Restaurant De Kas serves only vegetable dishes from its own garden. In the new cookbook Restaurant De Kas – From the land to the plate, chefs Wim de Beer and Jos Timmer take you from the nursery in Amsterdam and their garden in the Beemster polder to the restaurant, where they show you how to make 80 delicious vegetable recipes, such as these heirloom tomatoes and cucumber with lemon sorbet, at home.
Wim: “Every year we grow approximately two hundred tomato plants in Amsterdam and then take them to the Beemster to plant them in the ground. The tomatoes there – and the rest of the plants in the greenhouse in Amsterdam – provide us with hundreds of kilos of tomatoes, which are only picked when they are completely ripe. They are then carefully driven to Amsterdam and reserved as quickly as possible. We do not keep them in the refrigerator, so they have to be used up by the time the last guest leaves the restaurant. In this salad, we use both fresh and dried tomatoes (half and half). Briefly drying tomatoes in the oven gives them an extra-rich flavor. In the restaurant, we make our own ice cream and sorbets, but at home you can also buy good-quality lemon sorbet.”
How to make heirloom tomatoes and cucumber with lemon sorbet
- Put all the ingredients for the tomato water in a food processor and grind them finely. Then hang the mixture in a cloth and let it drain until a clear liquid remains. Season with salt and pepper. The quantity is slightly too much for one use, but you can easily freeze the remainder.
- Mix the two halves of the vanilla pod with the olive oil and store this in a bottle so that the oil can continue to absorb the flavor of the vanilla. Then stir 250 ml of the tomato water and 4 tbsp of the vanilla oil together.
- Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Dip the scored tomatoes in the boiling water for approximately 20 seconds and then place them directly in ice water. Peel them and cut them in half. Drizzle them with a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dry them for approximately 1.5 hours in an oven at 120 °C.
- Keep the other half of the tomatoes. We will use them fresh.
- Bring the water with the two types of sugar to the boil in a pan. Once the sugar has dissolved, add the lemon juice and allow it to cool slowly. Then add the egg white and mix well. Churn the mixture in an ice cream maker until it becomes a sorbet.
- Assemble the dish by starting with the two different types of tomatoes. Cut the fresh tomatoes into rough pieces and remove the stem. Season well with salt, pepper and lemon zest. Cut the cucumber into slices as thin as possible and, if desired, place them in ice water. Then slowly build up the dish with the dried and fresh tomatoes and finish with a spoonful of lemon sorbet. Spoon a little of the tomato water and vanilla oil alongside the dish. If desired, add some cucumber flowers, should you have a vegetable garden with a flowering cucumber plant.
Title: Restaurant De Kas Amsterdam – From the land to the plate
Author: Jos Timmer and Wim de Beer
Price: €34,99
Publisher: Kosmos
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