Delicious Green Tomato Chutney (Lower Sugar)
An easy homemade recipe for green tomato chutney that combines the tangy goodness of green tomatoes with a touch of sweetness. Mouthwateringly good, it’s perfect as a topping for meats and veggies or spread on sandwiches and wraps. Savor the tangy-sweet magic in every bite and reduce waste by using up your green tomatoes!
It’s definitely that special time of the year – no, not the holidays.
It’s that time of year when the weather is turning to frost and yet you have tomatoes on your plants that are not going to ripen before it hits.
What to do?
You could bring some indoors to ripen if they have any kind of coloring on them like this. But if they are solidly green they will not turn no matter what you try.
For many years I would just leave green tomatoes on the vines to compost at the end of the season. Which is totally okay if you don’t have time to deal with them.
But if you want to save them (since you did grow them and nurture them all summer long) there are a LOT of things you can make with them besides fried green tomatoes.
You can make salsa verde to can and eat all winter (yes, with green tomatoes if you don’t have tomatillos!).
And you can make all the recipes included in this e-cookbook:
One of which is this delicious, deeply flavored green tomato chutney recipe.
If you’ve been a reader of An Oregon Cottage, you know I have a long lasting love affair with my Addictive Tomato Chutney. I like a good rhubarb chutney or cherry chutney, but the tomato chutney has always been #1.
While I’m not ready to knock tomato chutney off the top just yet, this green tomato chutney is a close second. Like really close.
It has a slightly different flavor profile, both from the tanginess of the green tomatoes and the spices included. Chili powder gives it a slightly smokiness and dry mustard an earthy pungency.
It’s still a lovely sweet-tart condiment, although it has less than half the total sugars of other green tomato chutney recipes.
You can choose to refrigerate for short term storage or freeze or can for long term storage. Plus the steps are really easy (no need to peel green tomatoes!) so you can hopefully fit this into your busy season-ending schedule to save some of those green tomatoes!
Ingredients & Substitutions
Here’s what you’ll need to make this recipe:
- Green tomatoes – unripe tomatoes, not a green variety of tomato (like Green Zebra or Green Giant). Free of blemishes and not from frost-damaged vines. You can also use a combo of green tomatoes and tomatillos.
- Raisins – either regular or golden.
- Onions – yellow, white, or red.
- Garlic
- Brown sugar – coconut sugar will also work.
- Honey – if you can’t do honey, you can do all brown sugar, or cane sugar. You can try maple syrup, though it will affect the flavor.
- Salt – either pure sea salt or canning salt.
- Apple Cider Vinegar – or white vinegar.
- Chili powder – any blend you prefer, either mild or hot (you can find a homemade version in this chili recipe if you’d like to make your own).
- Ground dried ginger – it’s not okay to substitute fresh in canned goods (if you’re freezing the chutney, you can use fresh).
- Ground mustard
- Dried cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes – this is optional if you like spicy chutney and you can add as much or as little as you want.
How to Make Green Tomato Chutney
Detailed quantities and instructions are included in the full recipe box below, but here are a few extra tips to help with each step:
Step 1: Prep all your ingredients – wash and chop the tomatoes (core if needed, no need to peel) and chop the raisins, onions, and garlic in a food processor.
Step 2: Add the ingredients to a 6-quart or larger pot as they’re ready. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to maintain a low simmer for 1 hour or until thickened slightly.
After an hour, the chutney will have reduced some, but still be quite chunky.
Step 3: Blend the chutney to the smoothness you desire, either with a hand-held blender or by transferring to a blender in batches.
Step 4: At this point your chutney is done and you can do one of three things:
- Refrigerate: Let cool and transfer it to jars to store in the fridge for up to a month.
- Freeze: Let cool and transfer to freezer containers (leaving 1-2 inches of headspace for expansion) to freeze for a year and a half.
- Boil Water Can: can in jars using the steps below for shelf stable storage for up to 18 months. (Here’s a general boiling water canning tutorial if needed.)
Canning Steps:
- Keep the chutney warm, fill a water bath canner and set on the stove to heat. Wash seven half-pint jars and lids, keeping the jars full of hot water until ready to fill.
- Using one jar at a time, empty jar of water and ladle chutney into jar leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Run a thin spatula or chopstick around jar to release bubbles, wipe rim with a damp cloth and attach lid. Transfer jar to elevated rack in canner and repeat with remaining jars and chutney.
- Lower rack in canner, cover, and bring to a boil over high heat. Once boiling, start the timer for 15 minutes (you may need to adjust the heat a bit to keep at a boil, but not so much that the jars knock about).
- Turn off the heat when the timer goes off, remove the lid and let the jars sit in the water for 5 minutes. Remove jars to a towel lined surface to sit undisturbed for 12 hours.
- Remove rings, check seals and label jars. Store in a cool, dark place for up to 18 months.
Here are all the canning supplies I recommend, including the stainless steel canner I wish I had years ago!
Ways to Eat Chutney
Here are a few ways to use your delicious green tomato chutney:
- Have it on a sandwich – spread on grilled cheese is especially good.
- Add it to chicken salad.
- Serve it with charcuterie.
- Eat it with any kind of cooked pork or roasted sausages.
- Serve it with roasted chicken or roasted turkey.
- Warm goat cheese or brie, pour chutney over it and serve.
- Mix it with Greek yogurt or sour cream to make a dip.
- Use as a glaze for meat, roasted sweet potatoes, butternut squash, etc.
- Serve as a dipping sauce for egg rolls, vegetable fritters, or zucchini fritters.
- Add it to salad dressing, like this easy vinaigrette.
- Serve it on the side of Indian dishes like curry.
- Spread it on a burger.
Gifts: A jar or two of this chutney makes a great gift, too!
Need more ideas for dealing with and using up green tomatoes?
- Here’s how to ripen tomatoes indoors at the end of the season (the easy way!).
- Here’s my favorite Salsa Verde recipe that uses tomatillos or green tomatoes (or both), depending on what you have.
More Chutney Recipes
Here are a few of my favorite chutney recipes:
- Easy Addictive Tomato Chutney Recipe (Regular & Low Sugar)
- Blueberry Chutney Recipe To Can or Freeze (Honey Sweetened)
- Spicy Rhubarb Chutney to Can or Freeze
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Green Tomato Chutney Recipe (Lower Sugar)
Equipment
- 6-qt stock pot
- hand-held immersion blender or high speed blender (optional)
- Jars for canning or freezing
- water bath canner optional
Ingredients
- 9 cups washed, cored & chopped green tomatoes* (about 5-6 pounds)
- 2 cups apple cider vinegar or white vinegar
- 1½ cups chopped onions yellow, red, or white
- 1 cup raisins, chopped** (regular or golden)
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup honey***
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1½ teaspoons chili powder
- 1 teaspoon pure sea salt or canning salt
- 1 teaspoon ground dried ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon dry ground mustard
- ¼-½ teaspoon cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes, to taste
Instructions
- Prep all your ingredients – wash and chop the tomatoes (core if needed, no need to peel) and chop the raisins, onions, and garlic in a food processor.
- Add the ingredients to a 6-quart or larger pot as they're ready. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to maintain a low simmer for 1 hour or until thickened slightly.
- After an hour, the chutney will have reduced some, but still be quite chunky. Blend the chutney to the smoothness you desire, either with a hand-held blender or by transferring to a blender in batches.
Choose One of the Following to Store Chutney:
Refrigerate:
- Let cool and transfer it to jars to store in the fridge for up to a month.
Freeze:
- Let cool and transfer to freezer containers (leaving 1-2 inches of headspace for expansion) to freeze for a year and a half.
Boil Water Can:
- Keep the chutney warm, fill a water bath canner and set on the stove to heat. Wash seven half-pint jars and lids, keeping the jars full of hot water until ready to fill.
- Using one jar at a time, empty jar of water and ladle chutney into jar leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Run a thin spatula or chopstick around jar to release bubbles, wipe rim with a damp cloth and attach lid. Transfer jar to elevated rack in canner and repeat with remaining jars and chutney.
- Lower rack in canner, cover, and bring to a boil over high heat. Once boiling, start the timer for 15 minutes (you may need to adjust the heat a bit to keep at a boil, but not so much that the jars knock about).
- Turn off the heat when the timer goes off, remove the lid and let the jars sit in the water for 5 minutes. Remove jars to a towel lined surface to sit undisturbed for 12 hours.
- Remove rings, check seals and label jars. Store in a cool, dark place for up to 18 months.
sooooo much vinegar. awful and inedible. i have to now throw out. And i now lost 6 lbs of my green tomatoes that i picked from my plants. Sad! 🙁
Wowsa. Okay. I don’t want to sound flippant, but do want to say that this is my standard recipe I make every year and serve to many people and have never once been told it has too much vinegar, so there is no way I could’ve known you’d be sensitive to this amount. It’s a standard amount for this type of preserve (even less that some other popular recipes I’ve seen) and is there to make it safe for canning as well as flavor.
Secondly, you could add more sugar or honey to bring it to a flavor you can enjoy – I would never throw out food because of this.
Thirdly, the flavors meld and become milder with time, so canning and waiting for a few weeks or a month may result in a something you’d enjoy – again, I’d not just throw food out.
Could I add jalapeño’s and blend instead of the pepper flakes?@
To keep canning recipes safe, you can’t replace a dried ingredient with a fresh one so that wouldn’t be a good choice.
To be able to safely add jalapeños, you would need to replace an equal amount of onions (another low-acid fresh ingredient) with the jalapeños and then just omit the red pepper flakes.
I did just that. I left out the chillie flakes and instead used one green and one red jalapeno. Seeds removed. I also put in 3 small fresh chillies also without the pips. Delicious
That does sound delicious, Rita, but adding the fresh chilies will mess with the safety ratio for canning and room temp storage. I would suggest freezing it instead of canning.
I was so delighted with the flavor of this chutney. Four friends with widely varying taste buds tasted it before an Italian meal. They all loved it. It is so good as a dipping sauce for bread. I am going to serve some with the Thanksgiving turkey. Sadly, I only made a third of the recipe from the remaining tomatoes in my garden. Next year I am going for the full batch. Move over Major Grey! There’s a new chutney in town.
Oh, that’s a wonderful idea – I haven’t used it for bread dipping before! So glad you like it – love this: “Move over Major Grey! There’s a new chutney in town.” 🙂