Fried Green Tomatoes (aka, my recipe for Southern-style Fried Tofu)

The last two summers, I've grown tomatoes on our back porch and have had access to green tomatoes, which inspired me to experiment with making fried-green tomatoes, a food that takes me back to my childhood and Southern roots. I find that since moving to Canada, I have had the urge to make more traditional Southern foods much more than I used to, and thankfully, S really likes cheese grits, biscuits, peach cobbler, etc. It's been a lot of fun learning how to make these things and introducing him (and his québécois family) to Southern foods.


Here's the recipe I used last time I made fried green tomatoes. It's actually a recipe I ran across a while ago (and have slightly adapted) for making Southern-style fried tofu (instead of fried chicken), and I've been using it for a while for that. Yum. I only recently decided to use it to to try to make fried green tomatoes. I think the other time I made fried green tomatoes, I used more of a cornmeal-based recipe, probably something more along the lines of this one. We really liked them this new way though—they have a bit of a kick—so I plan to stick with this approach. I especially like that there are no eggs in it, and I love that it uses buttermilk, since I always have that on hand and enjoy cooking with it.

Some green tomatoes (or 1 block of tofu, depending on what you are making)

1.5 cups flour
2 cups buttermilk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp granulated garlic
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp dry mustard
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp basil

Pour the buttermilk and flour in separate bowls. Dip a slice of tomato (or tofu) in buttermilk, then put the now-wet slice into the flour bowl to coat it. Then put it back into the buttermilk again, then back into the flour bowl. Then pan-fry the slices with some margarine/butter in a skillet still they start to brown.

When I followed the recipe (with the measurements above, I usually end up with too much buttermilk and flour mixture (possibly because I am not using enough tofu?). So now, I generally use about equal smaller amounts of flour and buttermilk, and then toss the spices in roughly these proportions, but less, in bowls and wing it. There are more spices in the original recipe, but I cut them because I don't keep those them on hand.