Another Year, Another Tomato Tart!
I veganized Alison Roman's with a doenjang assist
Thank you so much for being here! That was the first line of my first post that I sent out a year ago yesterday, and I mean it even more today. Though I’ve started many, this is the longest I’ve ever sustained a blog-type entity, and it’s your enthusiasm and readership that keep me going, so thank you! If you like it, feel free to share with a friend or on social media, the more the merrier, you know?
Speaking of, there’s a lot more of you here today than there were last week, and I have my friend
to thank for that. Last week he published an amazing new recipe for “nonnato,” a veggie take on tonnato — an Italian sauce typically made from pureed tuna, anchovies, capers, and mayonnaise — that employs tofu in place of tuna and my own recipe for vegan anchovy paste.
I was super excited and made the sauce right away — unsurprisingly, delicious! I wrote more about it on Instagram if you want to have a look:
Anyway, if you’re new here, thank you and welcome! You can read more about me and this newsletter here if you like.
Sometimes I worry I’m a one-trick pony, food-wise — my anchovy paste recipe and this polemic defending anchovies at Vegetarian Times are by far my most read and shared food writing to date. But you know what? Cool! I love anchovies (the fishes, alive!), I love making vegan substitutions for animal products using plantbased ferments, and if veganizing anchovies is the trick this pony’s known for, great! A strong affiliation with anchovies certainly worked for Alison Roman, which is a terrible attempt at segueing smoothly into today’s recipe, sorry, I’m trying to write this fast!
Alison Roman’s Tomato Tart, Julia’s (Vegan) Version
(adapted from Sweet Enough by Alison Roman)
My first post one year ago was this recipe for a tomato tart, which I definitely still stand behind (and another way to use fermented beancurd should you have bought some to make, say, nonnato, or some yummy stirfried greens).
Since tomatoes are once again strutting their sweet, rotund stuff here in the northern hemisphere, I thought it’d be fun to make another one — a kind of World According to Tausch tradition. But I didn’t have much time to think up something new from scratch. Conveniently, I recently got Alison Roman’s Sweet Enough which includes a recipe for a fabulous-looking tomato tart. While the filling is already vegan — basically just tomatoes — the crust, in true Roman style, includes brown butter and an entire cup of parmesan, purporting to taste “like a Cheez-It or a refined Dorito.” Reader, not only was I undeterred, I was obsessed.
While I’m in many ways a mega-fan, I have a slightly fraught relationship with Alison Roman’s body of work. There’s the Kondo and Teigen scandal of course, and her — in my opinion more vexing — previous insistence on “having no culture.” For me, there’s also the fact that she makes meat-eating so sexy — casually roasted chickens and full tins of anchovies thrown around as if they’re nobody at all. In fact, I used Roman’s rampant use of the fish as a jumping off point for my aforementioned pro-anchovy screed, to the extent that my editor at Vegetarian Times, upon reading the first draft, advised: “If Roman could read this and respond with the ‘why are you so obsessed with me’ gif, we aren't ready yet.” Ahahahahaha! For shame!
Of course almost everyone in food media still uses tons of meat, Roman’s not alone there; and slight fraughtness aside, her recipes have taught me a ton about simplicity, salt, acid, umami-bombing, and baking things for much longer than I ever would have thought prudent. It was in pursuit of Roman-style Big Flavour that I started applying my favourite ferments — miso, fermented beancurd, umeboshi paste, shio koji1 — with a heavier hand than before in my non-Asian dishes, and it was her prodigious use of anchovies that motivated me to figure out a reasonable facsimile. I am grateful.
Substituting Parmesan
When I first read through the Sweet Enough Tomato Tart recipe, I knew I’d replace the cheese with some variation on my favourite vegan parm recipe of all time — Parmezano Sprinkles from Joanne Stepaniak’s iconic Uncheese Cookbook, first published in 1994 (click for a very mid vid of me making it). But I did worry a little. The taste of parmesan cheese I boldly (delusionally?) felt I could handle, but what did that much cheese do to a crust science-wise? I admit I still don’t really know, but I tried to get mathy about it and add my usual parm ingredients in ratios that would approximate the same fat, salt, and moisture as the cheese would provide.
For flavour, while Stepaniak uses miso, I decided this time to go with doenjang. Should you not be familiar, doenjang is a Korean fermented soybean paste used to season stews, soups, vegetables, and so on. While it’s similar to Japanese miso, it’s a bit saltier and more pungent, in part because it’s fermented differently, with a larger variety of microbes. I first learned about it at the 2022 Kojicon when Irene Yoo showed us her blocks of meju — the soybean-based starter culture — that she’d wild-fermented in her Brooklyn apartment, then turned into soy sauce and doenjang on her fire escape. RESPECT. Here’s Yoo making doenjang at home, this time with meju she bought at H-Mart:
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Though Yoo’s presentation blew my mind, I regrettably didn’t buy the paste until I read Eric Kim’s recipe for Creamy Doenjang Pasta, where he describes it as being “full of fermented sourness and deep Parmesan-like umami.” Sign! Me! Up! I made the pasta with soy milk — very good, do it! — and I have since started using doenjang to add an aged cheese-like flavour where I might have used miso before. On the more traditional side, I made the Doenjang Jigae with Tofu and Raw Zucchini from Kim’s book, Korean American, all winter long — it takes about twenty minutes all told and tastes like it simmered all day. Microbes! We love em!
You could definitely substitute miso here, and I think you’ll still get a yummy, flavourful crust. But in my humble opinion, outfitting your fridge and pantry with as many ferments as possible is the number one trick to making truly banging vegan food. If you have a Korean or larger pan-Asian supermarket nearby, doenjang is easy to find, and there are online options, too, depending on where you live.
For the omnivores: I did share a slice with my lovely neighbour, Shannon, who eats cheese, and she said that the crust was delicious and flavourful, but not necessarily cheesy. She saw, though, how vegans would think so. So that’s to be borne in mind, and if you make it I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, too. Either way, I won’t be offended, I love this crust regardless — to me it’s as Cheez-Itty as I could want!
My thanks to Alison Roman for this recipe. Though I typically would never make a tart like this with JUST tomatoes, no other filling underneath, I trusted her sensibility and I’m glad I did. It’s very different from last year’s tart, and it’s staying in the rotation!
NOTE ON SERVING:
Roman writes to let the tart “cool slightly” before slicing and serving, and that it’s best the same day. Maybe the cheese crust makes all the difference, but I find it a juicy mess if I let it cool any less than an hour, and more is probably better. I also think it’s good after an overnight in the fridge, either reheated in slices on a parchment-lined sheet pan or at room temp (you lose some crust crispness, but it’s okay.) Finally, again maybe the cheese in the original prevents this, but the bottom crust is going to be a little bit soft. It just can’t be helped with all those tomatoes juicing all over imo. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing, everything in concert tastes delicious.
Ingredients:
For the crust
1 cup/145 grams all-purpose flour
¼ cup/45 grams cornmeal
1/4 cup/25 grams ground almonds or almond flour, divided
1/3 cup/70g coconut oil
2 tbsp/10g nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp sugar
11/2 tsp sea salt
Lots of freshly ground black pepper (I use about 40 twists of my grinder)
Slightly heaped tbsp of doenjang, about 30 grams, or a bit more to taste (I might go harder next time and use less milk!)
1/4 cup plantmilk (I use soy) plus more if needed
1/2 tsp lemon juice or vinegar (optional)
For the filling
2 pounds/900 grams small tomatoes, thinly sliced. A mix of colours and types is nice.
2-4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced (I use two big guys)
Salt, pepper, and chili flakes (I use gochugaru for more flavour, less heat)
2 tbsp capers or olives, roughly chopped (optional)
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 tablespoon sherry, red wine, or white wine vinegar (optional, only use if you like things very acidic!)
Fresh herbs for serving if you like (I use basil)
Method:
Preheat oven to 375 F.
Toast 1 tbsp of the ground almonds in a small, dry frying pan over medium heat until golden and smelling toasty, 2-4 minutes. Watch and stir frequently so they don’t burn. Add coconut oil and cook 2-3 minutes until it all smells good and the almonds are a shade deeper brown, but not burnt. Set aside to cool a bit. (This is a good vegan brown butter hack in general imho.)
Meanwhile, mix the rest of the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add the doenjang and mix with your hands till incorporated.
Measure the soy milk and stir in the lemon juice or vinegar if using (curdling it just creates a bit more flavour, nbd).
Add the coconut oil and soy milk mixtures and mix with a fork and/or your hands to form a dough that easily sticks together when you press it. Taste a little of the dough and add more salt or doenjang if you like (and if you’re willing to eat a little raw dough for a treat!) If it seems dry, add another tablespoon of soy milk.
Press the dough into a 9 inch tart pan (mine is 9.5 inch and it’s fine, but I wouldn’t go larger!) or shallow pie plate, making sure the sides are evenly packed and there’s a nice, even layer on the bottom. I like to press it down with the bottom of my measuring cup. Grind more pepper overtop and press in with your fingers. Prick the dough all over with a fork to prevent puffing.
Bake until golden brown, 20-25 minutes. I recommend erring on the side of longer. The crust may crack a little at the bottom and, surprisingly, it’s fine, don’t stress.
Set the crust aside and leave the oven on, or leave it for a bit longer. (Roman says you can store well-wrapped at room temp for up to two days, but I haven’t tried, and hers of course has cheese. I’ve left it for about four hours, though.)
Layer in the tomatoes. I usually end up with about three layers. They shrink down as they bake, so don’t worry if you’re like, wow, it’s too many! Just fill the gaps with the little guys, keep going. Each time you complete a layer, sprinkle it with salt, pepper, and chili flakes. Top with capers or olives if using, drizzle with 2 tbsp olive oil, and salt and pepper again for good measure.
Place the tart pan on a sheet pan (this is a hot Alison Roman tip, tart pans are annoying to take in and out of the oven due to removable bottom), and bake until the tomatoes are jammy and starting to brown and caramelize on top, 55-65 minutes. I usually go 65 minutes, but ovens are all different.
If the tomatoes on top still don’t look caramelized at all, you could put under the broiler for a minute or two, but watch carefully so your crust and tomatoes don’t burn.
When you remove from the oven, it may look pretty juicy. Don’t worry. Splash the tart with vinegar, if using, and the last tablespoon of olive oil. Then let it cool at least an hour. Ideally it won’t be juicy any more. If it is, let it sit a bit longer, or put in the fridge overnight (see Note on Serving above). Sprinkle with fresh herbs before serving if you like.
All of which hail, of course, from the great fermentation cultures of East Asia, which I have researched somewhat extensively and attempted to make many of myself in what I hope is a spirit of appreciation versus appropriation. But if you disagree, feel free to let me know, I care about such discussions.
Yum!! Loved your last tart, and can't wait to make this one!