Let’s Make Some Romesco, Not Only Because It’s Red, But Because It Rules

When I learned that Defector would be running Reds Week for its random annual late-summer theme week, I had one thought: Man, I really wish I had another week of time off to spend. Every year, Tom Ley announces the theme of theme week, and people start kicking around story ideas, and I think to myself, OK, next year, no matter what, I have to remember to leave myself one full week of time off, so that I can skip theme week. And then I blow it. Blowing it is part of the tradition. Anyway, here I am. Let's make some romesco. By the grace of God, romesco fits not only thematically but seasonally. What it is is a paste made of roasted tomatoes, nuts, and bread. Here where I am—and by that I mean literally inside of my property line, and possibly nowhere else—now is the very climax of Tomato Time. You see, due to leaving town during optimal planting season back in the spring—this is where I blew it with my time off—I was late getting maters into the ground. And because I was already late, I went ahead and made myself super, turbo late, by procrastinating further. I did not plant tomatoes in my little stupid garden until mid-June, and at that point only because it was either grow tomatoes or grow invasive weeds, and the weeds were depressing me. So I planted nine tomato plants, a nearly random selection of the last seedlings still to be found at a nearby farm stand. It turns out two of those plants back there are Romas, which are terrific for sauces and for canning but are rather prolific determinate tomatoes, which means that you get a ton of them all at once, and you have to figure out what to do with them in a hurry, which is why they so often wind up in jars and cans and huge vats of Sunday gravy. The point is that romesco is a great thing to do with a haul of red tomatoes. You could also make it with yellow tomatoes, I suppose, but then you would be empty-handed for Reds Week and evidently that matters to some people! Your reason for making romesco, of really any color, is not only so that you can justify a blog and thus a paycheck. It is extremely delicious. In my humble opinion there are three things you should ever go out of your way to serve with a really good slab of white fish, and they are beurre blanc, salsa verde (the Italian one), and romesco. The theory is basically the same for the latter two: You smash things together until you have a luscious and richly colored sauce, and then you dunk your face in there and maybe even paint your upper body in the finished concoction. Where a good salsa verde tastes like anchovies, capers, and parsley, a good romesco tastes strongly of tomatoes and garlic, with the richness and crunch of nuts and the dark underlying molasses-y notes of good dried chiles. There are variations, of course—some are mildly spicy, some are less garlicky, some incorporate red bell peppers, some have clearly been bogged down with ancient paprika—but when romesco is made with really any fidelity at all it tastes super duper red, and I think you know what I mean by that. Let's make some.

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