Cooking with Trevor | Taco Tomatoes

Hey everybody, Chef Trevor here, Chef de Partie of Benchmark Restaurant at the Canadian Food and Wine Institute

and today I'm going to make you an appetizer star. We're going to put together a delicious taco tomato in less than 15 minutes

So let's get started cooking with Trevor. What I have today in front of me is all your classic taco ingredients, okay

I've got my iceberg lettuce, I've got some beautiful field tomatoes that I picked up this morning from the grocery store

When you're looking at tomatoes, you're looking for there to be no bruises on the outside

This green here should fall off really easily, it should come right away

And when we're looking at the tomato, we're examining, we don't want any bruising or soft spots anywhere

because the tomato is going to be the star of this dish today

Okay, so we want it to be super juicy, squeeze all over your cheek and get really delicious, okay

So when we're picking our tomatoes out, make sure we're taking the time to pick the best one

I'm just going to take those other green bits off our tomato before we move on

Now, for our tacos today, we're going to use ground beef. And I've mixed one packet of taco seasoning over it to saute it

And all we're going to do now is add one chopped white onion to it, sauteed, okay

And to do that, we need to go to our trusty extra virgin olive oil and a beautiful non-stick stainless steel frying pan, okay

We're going to put that over a medium high heat. We're going to add one tablespoon of oil to that pan

Now, like I've been saying to you all the time, the trick to getting things to fry properly in your frying pan is give it the time to heat up

We never, ever, ever want to add anything to a cold frying pan

So we're just going to wait for that medium high heat to kind of let that olive oil get glossy and shiny

Okay, it should become a bit thinner and it should start to pull towards the middle of the pan as it gets hotter

Now, I know a lot of people out there say, oh, you shouldn't cook with olive oil. It's got such a low smoke point and it's going to burn

The reality of the situation is you can cook with olive oil. You just can't sear with olive oil, okay

So what that means is if we're ever doing something in a pan where we want to get a crispy skin on a piece of chicken, we wouldn't use olive oil

But today, because we're only sauteing onion, it is completely fine to use olive oil

Our oil is nice and hot and we'll know when we put our onions in the pan and we hear that classic sizzle

That's what we're looking for when we're sauteing. Nothing fancy here. We just want to get it nice and caramelized

Much like every time you've seen me saute onions, we are looking for them to go translucent and start to change color

What we don't want to do is cook them on such a high heat that they start to burn on the outside

That's going to add a bitter flavor that we don't want. Just to help those onions along, I'm going to add just a pinch or about a half a teaspoon of salt and just a pinch or about a half a teaspoon of pepper

And that's going to start to draw out the moisture in the onions and help them cook a little bit faster

You'll see they're starting to go see-through if I hold them on my spoon

And once we get to that point with our onions, it's time to add our ground beef. In we go

And we just want to incorporate that. We just want to warm this through because remember, we've added the taco seasoning, we've followed the directions

and we just have this beautiful leftover taco meat that we just don't know what to do with

So we're just warming that up in the pan. Touch more salt and a touch more pepper

And we're just going to turn that down to a super low, minimal heat while we work with our tomatoes

One other trick to tomatoes, a lot of times what we do is we get the tomato, we get this beautiful, full, delicious-looking tomato

and then the first thing we do, because we think we don't need to eat this part, is we chop the whole top off

What I want to show you today is a little chef's secret to get the most out of your tomato

And that is to insert your knife just around what we call the core of the tomato

and nice and steadily making a circle all the way around until all you're wasting of that tomato is that bitter, hard-to-eat core

That's the only piece of your tomato you should ever be throwing away. Any more of that and you're wasting money

So we're just going to do that with all four of our tomatoes

The next thing we have to do is prepare our tomatoes so that they can be filled with all of our taco seasoning

So all we want to do is make cuts almost all the way through the tomato

We don't want to go all the way through here because what we want is it to fan open

And we're just going to do that like we're cutting a pie into eight beautiful sections

And we're just going to kind of fan it out like that

And you'll see taking out that core and fanning it almost all the way through has given us a perfect vessel to stuff all that delicious meat into the middle

So on the plate it goes. And another tip that a chef will always tell you is it's very important when chopping tomatoes to have a super sharp knife

If you don't have a super sharp knife at home with you, the next best substitute is to use a serrated knife

And the serrated edge will actually cut through the hard to do skin on a tomato that sometimes a dull knife will squish or push down on

Because what we want here is to keep the tomato nice and intact so that it can hold up to all the stuff we're going to put in the middle

Once our tomatoes are on our plate, we just want to simply give them a nice season with salt and pepper in the middle here

Just going to start to draw out some of the moisture of that tomato. Start to make it really juicy so that when you bite into it, it's going to be messy and your guests are going to get all over them and you're going to have a good laugh about it

And we just want to do some pepper as well at the same time. Just enough to start drawing out the moisture in that tomato

So our meat's gotten perfectly brown, our onions have gone nicely translucent, that taco seasoning is smelling fantastic

And all we're going to do is just put that meat right into the middle of our tomatoes

Now, it doesn't matter if we get messy at this point because what we're looking for here is something that our guests are going to pull apart and they're going to eat all at once as one big mess

This should literally last less than five minutes on your dinner table when you put it out for your guests

We just want to get that meat and push it right inside. Don't worry if a little bit spills over

We're not perfect. Nature's not perfect. What's actually going to happen is we add that nice warm meat to the tomatoes is it's actually going to start to briefly cook them so they're even going to get more tender and get beautifully tasty when we bring them to the table

And then we need to use iceberg lettuce. Now, iceberg lettuce, everyone's like, oh, great, iceberg lettuce

It just tastes like water. But the reality is in tacos, we're after the super delicious crunch of this lettuce

And it's really, really easy to shred. A lot of people kind of cut it off on the side

They only use one little bit. Then the rest goes brown in their fridge

But the best thing I can say to do on how to cut iceberg lettuce is actually the funnest thing to do because you just have to hit it on the cutting board, flip it over, and the core comes right out

And then all we have to do to shred that lettuce, cut it into four

We need only one quarter of the lettuce today for our dish

To preserve the other quarters, all you need to do is put them in an airtight container and use them within five days

So the other parts of your lettuce can then become a beautiful salad for you for lunch tomorrow, maybe with some of your leftover taco tomatoes, if there's any leftover

And then all we want to do is now that we're in that quarter world, we just want to take our knife, super sharp knife again, and just shred down

As thin as we can go. If yours is a little thicker than mine, that's not a big deal because as you practice and as you make taco tomatoes over and over again, the shred on your lettuce will get finer and finer

But like I always say, there's no race. We're just looking for it to be even

We're just going to then take that shredded lettuce and sprinkle it right on top

Then I've got a beautiful no dairy sour cream product here that we're just going to put on top of each tomato

And then I have a blend of non-dairy cheddar and mozzarella cheese that I'm just going to finish off and sprinkle on top

And there you have it. An appetizer for 15 made in less than 10 minutes

Taco tomatoes. Enjoy