Gogonele: Pickled Green Tomatoes
I'll admit it right away: this is an article about a food I've never tasted, even though I came across it three times in Chișinău. Gogonele are unripe green tomatoes from the last harvest of autumn, fermented whole in salty brine - a winter staple of Moldovan cuisine, though far from exclusive to it.
What Gogonele Means and Who Pickles Them
The neighbors make do with a description: in both Ukrainian and Russian, this dish is simply called fermented green tomatoes. Romanian has a word of its own for a green tomato destined for the brine. Gogonea, plural gogonele, comes from the dialect word gogon, a small, round, hard object - regional dictionaries use it for a glass marble, a ball of thread or even a potato. The dictionary definition then gets straight to the point: an unripe tomato "used to make murături".
Nobody tries to claim gogonele as their own: Romania and Moldova share both the name and the method, and all of Eastern Europe ferments green tomatoes the same way. The Poles, a fermenting superpower in their own right, humbly file them as a delicacy borrowed from their eastern neighbors. Georgian cuisine goes to extra trouble: before pickling, they slit the tomatoes open and stuff them with herbs, garlic and chili. And anyone who pours in vinegar instead of salt is making turshiya - a more distant cousin, sharper and without the bubbles.
A Young Dish from the Last Harvest
For a dish that feels as old as time, gogonele have a surprisingly short pedigree. The tomato didn't reach the Romanian lands until the 19th century, and a cookbook from the middle of that same century lists cucumbers, eggplants and mushrooms among its pickled vegetables - but not a single tomato. As late as the interwar years, a dictionary still defined gogonea as a small round pepper; the word didn't show up in dictionaries as a green tomato until the 1950s. No source says who first tossed an unripe tomato into a barrel. Moldova, on the other hand, added the tradition of murături - with tomatoes mentioned by name - to its national register of intangible heritage in 2010, and the traditional pickling aids listed there include not only dill and sour cherry leaves, but also aspirin.
The pickling itself follows precise rules. Gogonele are end-of-season tomatoes that won't ripen outdoors anymore - the last harvest, headed for the barrel instead of the compost heap. They get pricked near the stem so the salty brine can work its way inside and the gas produced during fermentation doesn't split them open. After that, all it takes is cold water, coarse salt, horseradish, celery and dill; some people throw in sour cherry or currant leaves as well. The sourness doesn't come from vinegar here, as it does in the sweet-and-sour mixed pickles we put up for the winter back home in Czechia, but from two to five weeks of lactic fermentation. A by-product is carbon dioxide: fully fermented tomatoes can fizz gently on the tongue, which is why Russian recipes simply call them gazirovannyje - carbonated.
How to Eat Gogonele and Where to Buy Them
Gogonele are winter food: a sour, salty bite that cuts through the fat of roast meat. They go with sarmale, belong on the Christmas and New Year's table, and in restaurants they come on a shared platter of murături; at home, people drink the brine too. And if you don't have a barrel of your own in Moldova, you'll find gogonele in the supermarket: sold by weight from a tub next to the pickled cucumbers, where a kilo cost 37.50 MDL (1.80 EUR), or in a jar labeled murate din butoi, barrel-pickled.
A Jar on the Asphalt
At the flea market known as Lokomotiv, in front of the railway station in Chișinău, a big unlabeled jar sat right on the cracked asphalt; my other two encounters with green tomatoes were courtesy of the supermarket. Each time I pulled out my phone - and never a fork. I did at least get to try their ripe cousins: the fermented red tomatoes on a platter of murături at Acasă la Mama. The flavor was incredible and, above all, unexpectedly fizzy, as if someone had lightly carbonated the tomato. If the ripe fruit can do that, just imagine the green one, which also stays crunchy in the brine. So my next trip to Moldova will start with green tomatoes.
