A little while ago… ok, it was quite a while ago, like nine months or something, I wrote down the idea ‘buffalo’d tomatoes and/with _______.’ It’s very sad that that note is still up on our board. Our enormous white board. If you ever have the misfortune of visiting our humble daycare/tornado of a home, you might learn quite a lot about what we’ve been doing, studying, learning, or discussing recently, as it is all probably scrolled in tragic print across our 6 foot by 4 foot white board. And my lists. My never ending lists. I have to admit I am a compulsive list maker. “Get back to your point, Vanessa!” Ah yes, I’ve sat on the idea of buffalo-ing tomatoes to put with something or on something… it has taken me a long time to figure it out, but at last! Buffalo Blooms!
I decided it would be an hors d’oeuvre and that I wanted to pair cherry tomatoes with the classic combination of buffalo sauce and blue cheese. I bounced around the idea of infusing the tomato with buffalo sauce as a marinade, but that will never work with the tomato’s skin. Next I took a more creative approach and tried injecting the sauce into the tomato using a needle. This idea is feasible, but the needles I had on hand were too small to get the sauce through, and I didn’t figure many people had access to needles regularly and in a large gauge. Maybe a diabetic elephant?
So I scrapped that idea, also. We tried marinating cheeses in various sauces, but never really got anything successful; at least not for this application… so back to the drawing board. Another idea (that would have gone with the injected tomatoes) was to wrap/coat them in blue cheese and then possibly to bread that and deep-fry it. There were many technicalities to that, would I have to freeze them? Or just chill them? Oh it just went around and around in futility. Finally, I gave up and just wanted to taste the combination of flavors together and in that I stumbled upon and created the recipe for Buffalo Blooms. Now for the final touch; I had originally used red cherry tomatoes, but quickly decided that golden cherry tomatoes create a nicer looking combination with the contrasting colors.
SO simple, SO delicious, and so much flavor bursting with each single-bite Buffalo Bloom.
Buffalo Blooms
By: avduley
Serves: varies according to group size
Ingredients:
- golden cherry tomatoes
- Blue cheese (wedge or crumbles)
- buffalo sauce
Directions:
- Slice an ‘X’ across the bottom of each tomato. about 1/3 of the tomatoes length. The round flat top (where the tomato connects to the plant) makes a more stable base and this configuration creates a nice presentation.
- Gently squeeze around each tomato at it’s middle, opening down, to discard the seeds.
- Either slice 1/2 inch cubes of blue cheese from a wedge or block, or select equivalently sized crumbles; one for each tomato.
- Using a small spoon, eye dropper, or syringe, fill the bottom half of each hollowed tomato with buffalo sauce.**
- Gently fold the ‘petals’ of each bloom out; the points on what is now the top of each bloom, that were created with the slices in step 1.
- Press a piece of blue cheese into the opening, making sure it is large enough to bulge out of the top.
- Plate your beautiful hors d’oeuvres and serve.
**For a large party or for time saving assembly, an alternative would be to stuff the blue cheese in the tomatoes first and drizzle the buffalo sauce across the tops after plating. But this is certainly more messy to eat and a little sloppy looking. Be sure to serve with tooth picks near for this application.
3 comments on “Buffalo Blooms”
What is the buffalo sauce made of?
We put a buffalo steak in our juicer.
…Just Kidding, it’s the red sauce they put on hot-wings. I used “Frank’s Red Hot: Buffalo Sauce.” You can find it really easy at Fred Meyer on the condiment isle. One of these days I will learn how to make it from scratch.
Thanks so much for checking out our site!
-Vanessa
Phyllis, if you’re still interested we actually just learned how to make hot wing sauce this last week! It uses hot sauce, garlic, and butter. No wonder hot wings are so good! Andrew added the sauce recipe and how to cut the meat to make hot wings from scratch to SemiseriousChefs. You can check it out here: http://semiseriouschefs.com/chicken-wings-and-buffalo-wings/