Wash and pat dry the tomatoes and chop it to roughly small pieces. I used to make tomato thokku with the skin. When cooked the tomato skins will be visible. If you prefer to have a very nice paste of tomato thokku, then we should remove the tomato skin. To remove the tomato skin, add tomatoes to boiling water and cover it with a lid and then after 5 minutes, take out the tomatoes and peel the skin. In this recipe below, i cooked the tomato with skin.

Heat oil in a pan, add mustard seeds. When the mustards seeds starts to sputter, add curry leaves and saute it in low flame for half a minute.

Add chopped tomatoes to the pan along with turmeric powder, salt and red chilli powder and keep in medium flame to cook the tomatoes.

While the tomatoes start to cook, we get lots of juice from tomatoes and we need to keep the flame in medium and allow the full juice to get evaporated and the tomatoes to be cooked completely and becomes mushy like thokku. Add thick extract of tamarind and stir the mixture occasionally so that the thokku doesn’t get stuck to the bottom of the pan and also to make sure it is not burnt. Cook the thokku till the oil starts oozing out from the mixture and there is absolutely no juice. Usually it ta

Finally add grated jaggery and fenugreek powder(Dry roast the fenugreek seeds and grind it to a nice powder in a mixer)  and let the thokku cook for another couple of more minutes and remove from flame.