What You Need to Know
Concassé, from the French concasser, "to crush or grind", is a cooking term meaning to roughly chop any ingredient, usually vegetables or fruit. This term is particularly applied to tomatoes, where tomato concassé is a tomato that has been peeled, seeded, and chopped to specified dimensions. Specified dimensions can be rough chop, small dice, medium dice, or large dice. The most popular use for tomato concassé is in an Italian bruschetta, typically small dice concasse mixed with olive oil and fresh basil, and sometimes other ingredients such as onion, olives, or anchovies.
Steps
- 1.
Bruschetta al Pomodoro (Italy): Provides consistent texture and maximizes tomato flavor release
- 2.
Sofrito (Spain): Creates uniform cooking base for paellas and stews
- 3.
Salade Niçoise (France): Allows tomatoes to integrate evenly with other ingredients
The Science
Primary Reaction
Cell wall breakdown