Spare Spoons Kitchen
Slow-Roasted
Tomatoes
Roma tomatoes halved, tossed with olive oil, salt and a little sugar, then left in a low oven until they've shrunk to half their size: sweet, concentrated and still soft in the middle. Make a tray at the weekend and you have a week of easy dinners, plus a jar of tomato-flavored oil.
Ingredients
Method
Cook's notes
What to do with them. Toss with pasta, garlic and Parmigiano for slow-roasted tomato pasta, or blitz them into pesto rosso. Pile them onto toasted sourdough with ricotta or burrata and flaky salt. Fold them into scrambled eggs or a frittata with goat cheese. Warm them with white beans, garlic and rosemary. Chop them into a farro or couscous salad with feta and olives. Spread goat cheese on puff pastry, top with the tomatoes and thyme, and bake. Or blitz a few into softened butter for a compound butter to slice onto steak, fish or corn.
The oil is a bonus. The olive oil in the jar picks up the tomatoes' flavor. Use it to start a pasta sauce, whisk it into a vinaigrette, or drizzle it over bread, beans or soup. It turns solid in the fridge; let the jar sit out for ten minutes, or spoon out what you need, and it melts quickly.
Keep the garlic out of the jar. Garlic stored in oil is the one real food-safety risk here: it can carry botulism spores, and oil seals them away from air. Eat the roasted cloves right away, or refrigerate them separately and use them within four days. The tomatoes themselves, refrigerated under oil, keep for about a week.
Freezing. For longer storage, freeze the cooled tomatoes flat in a zip-top bag, with a little of their oil. Lay the bag flat on a tray until it's solid, then you can break off just what you need. They keep for about three months and go straight into a sauce or soup from frozen.
The best use for winter tomatoes. Pale, out-of-season romas have very little flavor raw, and a long, slow roast concentrates what they do have. That's what the sugar is for, too. In late summer, when tomatoes are good, leave it out.
Easier, if you like
- No time to roast? For the pasta or the pesto, a jar of Mezzetta Julienne Cut Sun-Ripened Dried Tomatoes in olive oil (near the olives and jarred peppers) stands in. They're chewier and more intense than slow-roasted tomatoes, so use about half as much, and use the oil from their jar too.
Vegan and gluten-free as written
Other tomatoes: Campari or other small round tomatoes work the same way and finish sooner, so start checking early. Large cherry tomatoes need even less time. Big slicing tomatoes are too watery: they collapse before they concentrate.
No fresh thyme: a pinch of dried oregano or dried thyme scattered over the tomatoes before they go in, or leave the herbs out entirely.