How to prepare tomatoes

A recipe from cooking-ez.com

For 4 tomatoes, you will need:

• 1 4 tomatoes
• Total weight: 400 grams

Times:

Preparation	Cooking	Start to finish
39 min.	1 min.	40 min.

Step by step recipe

• 1: Boil a large pan of water, and prepare a large bowl of cold water (the kitchen sink, half filled, is fine).
• 2: Remove the small green stalk from each tomato (if there is one).
• 3: Then with a good knife cut a cross in the top of each tomato.
• 4: When water is boiling, put two or three tomatos in the pan. Leave them in for 20 seconds.
  Note: If you leave tomatoes too long in boiling water, they will start to cook, and that's not the goal.
• 5: The skin will split, starting from the top incision.
• 6: Remove them with a skimmer or a fork, and plunge immediately into cold water. Continue with all tomatoes.
• 7: Other way:
  Joel Robuchon advised in one of his recipes to avoid plunging tomatoes in water (because it removes some of the taste), but instead to stick the fruit on a fork and turn it above a gas flame. It works well.
• 8: Remove tomatoes from cold water, peel off the skin with a knife discard it.
• 9: With a knife remove the green and hard core of the tomatos ("the bone"), and discard it. The tomatoes are ready to be used, in a tomato tart for example.
• 10: If you want only tomato flesh: cut them in four.
• 11: Then cut each quarter, from top to bottom, exactly as if you were tracing a "C" with the knife blade.
• 12: Discard the intside of the quarter, and remove any remaining seeds.
• 13: You should have made tomato petals, ready to be used just as they are or cut smaller, in a salad with garden herbs for example, or cooked in another recipe like the tomato preserve.

Remarks

The tomato is a very delicate fruit that fears the cold. If you put it at the refrigerator, it will very quickly lose the little taste that it has (if it's a commercial tomato, which cannot compete with a home-grown tomato). So it's best simply to store them at room temperature.
According to the variety of tomatoes, and the thickness of skin, (home-grown tomatoes have thicker skins), it might be necessary to leave them in boiling water for a few seconds longer. In any case, never exceed 30 seconds, otherwise the tomatoes start to cook.
Some recipes suggest removing the core of the tomato before putting it into boiling water. I think this is a bad idea, because the water gets inside the tomato and reduces the flavour even more.

---