SUN-dried Tomato Pickle – Tomato Pachadi

Sun-dried Tomato Pickle, Tomato Pachadi is a pickle made using sun-dried tomatoes during summer. It is a spicy tangy pickle with loads of garlic in it. This is one of my favourite pickles in the whole world of pickles. My neighbour would make this when I was a kid and I used to love it. I now learnt it from her and I love to follow the elaborate method of making it as I do not want to compromise with the taste at all.

In these  difficult times of Covid-19, when every city is under lockdown and when everyone is restricted to their homes, my respect for age old methods and practices has gone up another level. I have always been a believer in our age old methods and traditions and these situations have made my beliefs more stronger. During these trying times cooking for the family, cleaning up every cupboard from top to bottom, spending all my time with family and taking everything slowly is what is keeping us sane. It feels like we have gone back 2 centuries and I am loving it. Less waste generation, eating home cooked food, observing every new leaf that grows in the plants and staying home over the weekend.  When all this is over, I wish we can still stick to some of these changes we have made now.

Back to Sun-dried tomato Pickle. I am using this time in hand, to dry tomatoes to make Sun-dried tomatoes and store them for Salads, pastas and soups. You can check out the recipe here. I also made this Tomato Pachadi and trust me it is worth all the effort.

*Pachadi in Telgu = Pickle 

Ingredients

2 kilos – Tomatoes

1/2 cup – salt

4 bulbs – Garlics

20 – Dry red chillies, or according to your taste ( I used Byadgi chillies)

1 lemon size – Tamarind

1/4 cup – Jaggery powder

Handful of curry leaves

2 cups of oil

2 Tbsps – mustard seeds

Method

To make Sun-dried tomato pickle wash the tomatoes well and let it air dry for an hour.

Slice them into 1cm thick slices or cubes and layer them along with the salt in a jar or a utensil.

Let it sit in the jar overnight.

In the morning the tomatoes would have completely released the juice.

Squeeze the tomatoes and spread them on plates sparsely.

Soak the tamarind in the tomato juice in a shallow utensil.

Place the tomatoes and the juice in harsh sun for one full day. Leave it in a place where there is sun full day.

Get it in at night. Mix the juice and the semi dried tomato pieces and leave it in the refrigerator.

If you have good harsh sun, the tomatoes should be dry enough by now and the juice would have reduced in quantity.

If not, squeeze the tomatoes again and place it in the sun for another day.

Squeeze the tamarind and extract all the juice.

Now grind the dried tomatoes along with the tomato tamarind juice and red chillies to a coarse paste.

Heat oil in a deep, heavy pan.

Add mustard seeds and let it crackle before you add curry leaves. let the curry leaves crisp up.

Now add the finely chopped garlic to it and let it brown.

Add the ground tomato paste, jaggery powder and cook it on low flame till the colour turns completely dark and oil separates.

Check for salt, spice at this stage. Add red chilly powder if you need more spice.

It will take at least a couple of hours.

Once it is cooled, store it in a jar and it will stay for months if you let it stay 🙂

Enjoy it with anything and everything.