There is a point every August — it tends to arrive without warning, somewhere in the second week — when the pace of summer produce outstrips the capacity to deal with it thoughtfully. The courgettes that were careful choices at the start of the month are now unavoidable. The tomatoes that required attention and ripening are now ready all at once. The herbs are lush and slightly threatening in their quantity.
This is not a problem to be managed. It is, if you take it as an instruction rather than an inconvenience, one of the best moments in the kitchen year.
What the glut tells you
A glut tells you that the window for a particular thing is open, and that the window will close. Tomatoes at their best in mid-August are not the same tomatoes that will be available in October — not in flavour, not in price, not in the experience of eating them. The abundance is not excess; it’s a cue.
The appropriate response to a glut is not to use the produce more slowly and carefully to extend it. It’s to lean into it — to cook larger quantities, to use imperfect pieces for sauces and roasting rather than discarding them, to think at scale.
Roasting as the default answer
When any vegetable is arriving faster than it can be cooked at the attention it deserves, roasting is almost always the right answer. Courgettes, tomatoes, peppers, aubergines: all of these roast well at high heat, concentrate in flavour and reduce dramatically in volume, and keep in the fridge for four or five days in olive oil.
The technique: halve or quarter, toss generously in olive oil, season, roast at 200°C until collapsed and caramelised. The result is a base ingredient that can become a pasta sauce with pasta water and Parmesan added, a tart filling with eggs and cream, a pizza base, a shakshuka base, or simply a side dish for anything. The work done once yields four or five meals.
The tomato sauce question
There is a specific argument every August for making a large batch of slow-cooked tomato sauce from imperfect or very ripe tomatoes. Not the careful single-batch sauce of a midweek dinner — a large quantity, simmered for a long time until deeply concentrated, decanted into jars or freezer containers, and used across the following months.
The technique is simple almost to the point of insult: halved tomatoes, olive oil, garlic if you want it, nothing else, roasted at 160°C for two to three hours until collapsed and jammy, then passed through a mouli or pushed through a sieve. The resulting sauce has an intensity that a fresh tomato sauce made in forty minutes never achieves. It freezes well. It improves pasta, braises, stews and shakshuka across October, November, December.
The courgette problem and its solution
The courgette that has grown too large is not the same vegetable as the small one. It is drier, slightly less flavourful, more seedy at the centre. But it is not useless. The large courgette is excellent for: stuffing and baking (hollow the centre, fill with a ricotta and herb mixture, bake at 180°C for 40 minutes); grating and frying into fritters with a little flour and egg; slicing into thick rounds and braising in tomato sauce until very soft.
The error is treating a very large courgette as a failed small courgette and cooking it as though it were one. It isn’t. Work with what it is.
The herb preservation window
Late August is the point at which soft herbs — basil, particularly — begin to decline. The plants run to seed. The flavour becomes more intense and slightly bitter. This is the moment to make herb oil in quantity: large amounts of basil blended with good olive oil and frozen in small portions. The flavour holds in the freezer better than almost any other preparation, and a cube of basil oil added to a January pasta sauce is one of the small summer repayments that makes the August kitchen work feel worthwhile.
The glut is not something to manage. It’s something to convert. The question isn’t how to slow the rate of arrival — it’s how to preserve the intensity of the moment for the months that don’t have it.