The Spirits #141: The Tomatini
My take on the brat drink of the summer
~ THE TOMATINI ~
Two excellent small tomatoes
A few basil leaves
50ml vodka
5ml sugar syrup
Teaspoon of red wine vinegar
Salt, pepper, olive oil
First, place a cocktail glass in the freezer. Now make the cocktail. Muddle the tomatoes in the bottom of the shaker with the basil leaves. Add the vodka, vinegar and sugar syrup, followed by the salt and pepper. Add a decent amount of ice and shake hard for 20 seconds. Now strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve into the cold glass. (The sieve will edit out all the tomato gunk… though be warned, it gets pretty mushy in that shaker, so you may need to encourage the cocktail out with a spoon).
Garnish with a few dots of olive oil and something salty on a stick. I opted for a gilda. Google it!
Hello. Welcome back. Good lord. Music… And see you below the line.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. ➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.
EVERY year, it is media law, there has to be a drink of the summer. Chicken wine. The Paloma. Madri lager. Flavoured saké. These have all had their claims on 2024.
But now that the summer has fast-forwarded into mid-autumn - all the leaves being brown and the sky being… well actually quite a nice shade of blue - it’s time to crown a winner. A drink that seems to have gone from “huh?” to “yuh!" in the flap of a swallow’s wing. It’s not brand new. And yet. All of a sudden, this summer, the Tomatini was everywhere.
OK, “everywhere” is a relative term in our kaleidoscope age - when a phenomenon can generate a billion gasps in one dimension (TikTok) and register a total blank in another (IRL). But on my cocktail-related feeds at least it would appear to be all about the Tomatini in 2024. It is the Everything Is Romantic by Charli xcx of cocktails. The Capri pants of cocktails. The Dynamic Pricing of cocktails. Just sipping it is making me nostalgic for, like, five minutes ago.
The drink was invented by the Niçois bartender Jimmy Barrat in Dubai circa 2012. Immediately, those of us who take an interest in alcohol geopolitics will say ooh, that’s interesting, Dubai, perhaps we’ve been looking in the wrong places for inspo all this time? But actually, Barrat was working at the Provençal restaurant, La Petite Maison, at the time - and the whole idea was to create a cocktail that captured “the Spirit of the South of France in a glass.”
His original Tomatini recipe is approximately:
One ripe vine tomato
50ml vodka
10ml white balsamic vinegar
10ml sugar syrup
Dash lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Quarter the tomato and muddle with the vodka. Add everything else to the shaker with copious ice, agitate until your hands hurt and strain.
I should say I haven’t been able to locate the exact original recipe. Some versions online I’ve found add lemon juice and others do not. In this interview, Barrat says he uses a dash of lemon juice but then, infuriatingly, gives no specs (I’ll let you know when he gets back to my request!). My hunch is that just a little spritz is required. The vinegar should add enough acidity on its own and maybe just a touch of sweetness too. Besides which, it’s not a Tomato Sour, it’s a Tomatini, rather in the vein of the Appletini, the Lychee Martini, etc. It shouldn’t be really sharp. It should be soft and mellow. As Barrat says:
“I don’t like tomatoes when used in juices. I don’t drink bloody Mary. So my approach was to treat the tomatoes as what they are: a fruit.”
The crucial difference with the Bloody Mary of course is the use of fresh tomato. It should really go without saying that the drink stands or falls on the quality of this scarlet orb. Your fridge-cold salad tomatoes will not cut it here. You need something plucked from the vine, soft to the touch, full of fragrance.
And then it’s not hard to see how the Tomatini has taken off. It’s interesting, it’s original, it’s a teeny bit bratty. It’s the perfect thing to drink as an aperitif with a few salted snacks (olives, anchovies, cornichons, taralli biscuits). But it doesn’t require any particularly fancy ingredients. Rather, it pushes you to use familiar ingredients in a new way. That’s good cocktailing.
It’s also quite adaptable. I don’t have white balsamic so I used sherry vinegar instead. It’s sharper than balsamic so I used less of it but it still worked a treat. (Red or white wine vinegar or cider vinegar I daresay would work just as well.) You can also play on the savoury notes of the tomato. A dash of fino sherry - perhaps even French vermouth? And as with a Bloody Mary, a little seasoning won’t go amiss.
It also occurred to me while liying on a sunbed in Capri that it would adapt rather nicely into a Caprese Martini. A couple of basil leaves, a splash of buffalo mozzarella brine, som nice grassy EVOO by way of garnish? I am going to make one TONIGHT and report back.
Still, I’d resist making it too spicy or doing what I usually do with Bloody Marys which is to sub out th vodka for tequila. (If you fancy something like that, can I recommend the Vampiro?) The essence of the Tomatini is cool, fragrant Mediterranean simplicity. A striped awning. A turquoise bay. Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin. Four generations make up a family. Tomatoes are still good. Savour them now.
PLAYLIST
I am just back from a little Italian holiday - Ischia, Capri, delightful - and we spent quite a bit of it listening to Nilla Pizzi, Paolo Conti and various other vintage Italian singers. I’ve made a playlist of some of my favourites.
THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.
SHOPPING LIST:
Watch this space on Monday.
🍸
Great with gin too! 🍅
I’ll try this tonight.
A thought: I’ve been trying to make the perfect Bloody Mary for about thirty years. I thought I had it down pat: vodka, fino sherry, proper tomato juice, celery salt, white pepper, Tabasco, Lea & Perrins, lemon juice, shake, double strain into ice filled half pint beer goblet, celery stick and lemon wedge garnish. It was pretty good but it took about ten minutes to make.
Then the other day I was cooking and had about twenty seconds to make a drink. Vodka, ice, a cold 150ml can of Big Tom. Twenty seconds and it’s at least as good as any longwinded combo I ever put together. Sometimes simpler really is better.