“Plant ’em in the spring, eat ’em in the summer; all winter without ’em’s a culinary bummer!”
–The late, great John Denver, from his song, “Homegrown Tomatoes.”–
Oven-Roasted Tomatoes
Description
John Denver was right. All winter without homegrown tomatoes is, in fact, a culinary bummer.
Show of hands: How many of you have gone to the store in, say, February, and been taken in by those ripe, brightly-hued, yummy-looking tomatoes--and especially those particularly heinous "tomatoes-on-the-vine?--paid a small fortune for them, and been treated to hard, tasteless, slightly sour hockey pucks? Everyone?
That's about what I thought.
And that's where this recipe comes to the rescue!
Oven-roasting tomatoes concentrates and deepens the luscious sweet tanginess of the fresh tomatoes and it's definitely the best way to preserve tomatoes for use in Keri's Killer Red Pasta Sauce for use in the "culinary bummer" months. Oven-roasted tomatoes are also great eaten warm out of the oven on a slice of fresh sourdough bread, drizzled with a little very good olive oil. Oven-roasted tomatoes freeze beautifully and also re-heat beautifully.
A few pieces of advice: please use very, very fresh, very high quality olive oil for this recipe. With only a couple of ingredients in this recipe, rancid or poor quality olive oil will ruin the recipe.
Also, please feel free to add any other herbs you'd like to add--rosemary, thyme, Herbes de Provence, etc. I almost never do because I want the recipe to remain flexible to add to whatever I want to use it in, but they lend themselves to whatever additional herbs you'd like.
Ingredients
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 250*. Arrange sliced tomatoes on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
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Roast for 4-5 hours, or until the tomatoes are beginning to curl up around the edges. You can definitely dry them for longer, but I usually pull them out at about the stage pictured. These are about the perfect "doneness" for Keri's Killer Red Pasta, which is mostly what I make with them in the winter.
