Every year it happens the same way. For weeks you’re willing the courgettes to do something, and then overnight they declare war — marrows the size of your forearm hiding under the leaves, a colander of tomatoes ripening faster than anyone can eat them, beans by the carrier bag. A glut is a good problem, but only if you have a plan. Here’s what we actually do with the August surplus, from tonight’s dinner to the depths of winter.
That is a single pick from a home crop, and it shows the thing that makes a tomato glut different from a shop bag: the fruit is all sizes at once. Cherry, salad and a couple of proper beefsteak-ish ones ripen together, which is exactly why a glut is awkward to cook with. The quick wins below sort themselves along that line — the small ones want roasting whole or halving into a salad, and the big irregular ones, which are the ones that split and spoil first, want using the same day.
Eat it now: the quick wins
The first answer to a glut is simply to eat well off it while it’s at its best. A few things we come back to every year:
- Courgette fritters — grated courgette squeezed dry, an egg, a little flour, feta and mint, fried in spoonfuls. Uses a surprising amount and disappears just as fast.
- Roasted tomato sauce — halve everything, roast hot with garlic and oil until collapsing, blitz. Better than anything in a jar and the base for half the week’s meals.
- Ratatouille — the classic glut-clearer; courgettes, tomatoes, peppers and whatever else is piling up, cooked slow.
- Soup — a courgette and a potato and a stock cube make a smooth lunch in twenty minutes.
- Beans, if they have come at the same time — and they usually have. Sliced runner beans simmered slowly into the same garlicky tomato sauce is the best way to deal with two gluts at once; there is more on the bean half of the problem in our runner bean glut plan.
Preserve it: freeze, dry, bottle
When you genuinely can’t eat any more, switch to storing it. Tomatoes freeze beautifully once roasted down into sauce — portion it flat in bags and you have summer in January. Grated courgette freezes raw in measured bags, ready to drop straight into fritters or cakes. For the long haul, drying concentrates everything: oven-dried or, far more reliably, done low and slow in a dehydrator — our guide to the best food dehydrators covers the models that handle a heavy tomato glut without you babysitting trays. And if you’re freezing in bulk, sealing the air out is what stops freezer burn turning your hard work to mush six weeks later; the best vacuum sealers earn their keep in glut season more than any other time of year.
Cook ahead and bank it
A word on the marrows first, because every year a few hide under the leaves and come out the size of your forearm. They are not ruined, they are just watery and mild: halve them, scoop the seeds, and stuff and bake them, or grate the flesh, squeeze it hard in a tea towel and use it in fritters and cakes where the moisture would otherwise be a problem. What they will not do is behave like a young courgette in a quick fry-up, so stop trying to make them.
The other way to get ahead of a glut is to cook it into meals now and freeze those. A big batch of ratatouille or roasted-tomato sauce on a Sunday becomes three or four dinners later in the month — our one-pot batch cook is built exactly for this, and a rice cooker ticking away in the corner means the carb half of the meal looks after itself while you deal with the veg mountain. If you want a proper system for it — prep schedule, shopping lists, a freezer tracker — our Batch Cooking Planner is £3.99 in the shop.
When you simply have too much
Some gluts beat even the most organised kitchen, and that’s fine. A box left at the end of the drive with an honesty note vanishes in an afternoon; a bag taken to work or the school gate makes you very popular. Whatever’s past its best goes on the compost heap and comes back as next year’s soil. For more on staying on top of the plot through high summer, our August garden jobs has the running order. A glut only feels like a burden when you’re staring at it with no plan — with one, it’s just the garden paying you back.
Was this useful?
