6 days ago
INdulge: It's tomato season. This summer salad is the best thing I ate in Indy this week
I spent last weekend up north in the charming lakeside town of Syracuse, where I read some books, played some euchre and swallowed what felt like roughly one eighth of Lake Wawasee (I'm really bad at swimming).
The trip brought back memories of childhood visits to my grandparents' home in nearby South Bend, where no summer was complete without eating something grown in the dirt of my grandmother's garden. Something like:
While it feels wrong to visit Goose the Market and not get a sandwich, the Near Northside deli counter is currently one of the local eateries you're most likely to find a big honking pile of tomatoes. So for this week's INdulge, I purchased the market's burrata salad.
Previously in INdulge: This beautiful, messy hot dog is the best thing I ate in Indy this week
Goose serves the salad every Thursday during peak tomato season, which in Indiana typically runs through the end of August. A thicket of peppery mixed greens supports six palm-sized slabs of heirloom tomato and a rotund blob of burrata, a delightful balloon-like dairy product filled with mozzarella shreds and clotted cream.
The burrata is cool and rich, faintly sweet and a plenty salty with a twinge of sourness. It's great, but I came for the tomatoes.
Though best known for corn and soybeans, Indiana also grows a lot of tomatoes (tuh-may-tuhs, as my Hoosier grandfather would have called them). Most of the crop is raised by Elwood-based Red Gold, the largest privately owned tomato processor in the United States.
Goose the Market sources its tomatoes from Full Hand Farm, a small organic grower in Noblesville that provides produce for multiple Indianapolis-area restaurants including Beholder, Bluebeard and Tinker Street.
The green-flecked heirlooms are plenty sweet for a fruit that is, gastronomically speaking, basically a vegetable. They have the trademark acidity and dense, pulpy texture that I understand many small children and even some grown adults don't really vibe with but that I adore. Dressed up with balsamic vinaigrette and ground pepper, Full Hand's tomatoes make a lovely and filling lunch for $13.
That price point should feel reasonable to anyone who has ever bought a quart of deliciously gnarly-looking farmers market tomatoes for — and this may be a slight exaggeration — roughly a million dollars.
In truth, good tomatoes at a forgiving price are hard to come by. Nowadays, most mass-market tomatoes in Indiana are harvested with machines, as large-scale producers breed their tomatoes to have thicker skins that can better withstand machine-picking. But those tomatoes also lack some of the flavor compounds found in hand-picked varietals, yielding plants that taste less like summer fruit and more like Del Monte's take on packing peanuts.
When it comes to harvesting flavorful tomatoes en masse, man beats machines every time. From a humanitarian standpoint, well, you can probably guess where this is going.
Hand-picking, which was the modus operandi in Indiana until the 1980s and still is in parts of Florida and California, is extremely hard work. Pickers spend long days in the summer heat, backs bent beneath the beating sun.
For much of our nation's post-slavery history, that labor has primarily been performed by migrant workers, many of them Mexicans or Mexican Americans who follow seasonal farm work across the country in exchange for meager pay and dormitory-like living accommodations of varying quality.
The 1964 repeal of the Bracero Program, which for 22 years allowed Mexican immigrants to temporarily work on farms throughout the United States, had rapid consequences for Indiana farms. In a 1965 article from the Marion Leader-Tribune, Hoosier farmers statewide reported that roughly a fourth of their tomato crop had rotted due to unfavorable weather and a failure to attract enough workers.
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Regional employment offices tried to recruit lower-class 'local persons' to perform the backbreaking work, with little success. One might speculate that those contacted had little interest in developing chronic lumbar pain and/or pesticide poisoning for $1 an hour, but I don't want to make assumptions.
The United States has tried repeatedly to wean itself off immigrant employment, but cheap labor is a tough habit to kick. The agriculture industry remains one of the nation's largest employers of documented and undocumented immigrants, historically America's most willing suppliers of low-paying menial labor.
This isn't meant to make you feel like a robber baron every time you buy a bag of Romas at Kroger, just a reminder that really good tomatoes are hard-earned, so enjoy the ones you can. I encourage you to swing by Goose the Market on an upcoming Thursday for a dish that's literally glistening with the flavors of a Hoosier summer. Bring your own bug bites.
What: Burrata salad, $13 every Thursday while tomatoes are in season
Where: Goose the Market, 2503 N. Delaware St., (317) 924-4944,
In case that's not your thing: Sandwiches are the name of the game at Goose the Market. Sliced-in-house cold cuts and a variety of toppings adorn Amelia's bread on daily offerings like the Goose (prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, olive oil and pepper, $14) and the Batali (capocollo, soppressata, provolone, romaine, marinated red onions and tomato preserves, $14). There are also rotating daily specials, with vegetarian versions typically available. Broad Ripple Chips, gelato and cans of craft beer round out the menu.
