Sweet Green Tomato Pie

The most well-know dish using green tomatoes is undoubtedly fried green tomatoes, a specialty from the American South. However, it is not the only dish you can make with green tomatoes. You can also use green tomatoes in baking and desserts. This delicious green tomato has a filling of green tomatoes, sugar, and cinnamon, tucked between a buttery double crust pie.

If you grow your own tomatoes, this pie is another way of using up unripe tomatoes that have been knocked off the plant by rain and wind and not by disease, or green tomatoes you need to pick before the first frost turns them in.

With more varieties of heirloom tomatoes and new tomato varieties appearing every year, some of which are green in color when ripe, make sure that you are really buying green tomatoes for this pie. Sometimes the names can be deceiving. For example, "Green Zebra" and "Aunt Rubie's German Green Tomato" are tomatoes that are green when ripe.

Like all pie fillings, the green tomatoes need to be precooked first. Green tomatoes are firm and lack the juiciness of ripe tomatoes though the filling still needs to be thickened, which is accomplished by adding sugar and cornstarch. 

Instead of making the double pie crust from scratch, you can also use a ready-to-baked pie crust or a pie crust mix but or course, homemade pie crust always tastes better.

If this pie has inspired you to try other sweet treats with green tomatoes, there's also green tomato cake.