Cherry tomatoes can play multiple roles beyond the salad bowl. Stuff with herbed goat cheese for a quick appetizer. Sauté with garlic and herbs in a sizzling skillet until their skins pop, then toss with pasta.
To take them up a notch, slow-roast them.
Chef and cookbook author Antony Worrall Thompson tosses roasted cherry tomatoes with pasta and he pairs them with fish. “Sacrifice some time in the name of simplicity,” he writes in “The Essential Low Fat Cookbook: Good Healthy Eating for Every Day” (Kyle Books, $35), “because the roasting process really intensifies the tomato flavor.”
That concentrated and caramelized flavor is one reason editors at Fine Cooking magazine suggest slow-roasting tomatoes in their book “Fine Cooking in Season: Your Guide to Choosing and Preparing the Season’s Best.” “It is so easy and yields such delicious results that you’ll soon add it to your repertoire.”
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Calling them “a secret ingredient,” they add them to pastas, sandwiches and salads or serve them alongside grilled meats. They suggest storing roasted tomatoes for a week in the refrigerator; longer in the freezer. And if there’s any extra roasting oil, drizzle it on grilled vegetables or crusty bread.
Roasting
If you don’t have cherry tomatoes, roast plum tomatoes with this recipe adapted from Fine Cooking Magazine’s “Fine Cooking In Season.”
Roasted plum tomatoes:
Halve through the stem end and seed 4 to 5 pounds plum tomatoes. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 12-by-17-inch rimmed baking sheet with foil (then parchment if you have it). Coat pan with 3 tablespoons olive oil. Arrange halves, cut side up, turning to coat bottoms with some oil. Sprinkle sparingly with kosher salt, sugar and scant 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar. Thinly slice 3 to 4 garlic cloves; arrange slices over tomatoes. Sprinkle with fresh thyme. Pour 1 cup olive oil over all. Roast in center of oven until tomatoes are dark reddish brown, with deep browning on edges. Cool. Serve warm or at room temperature. Store in refrigerator up to a week or in a freezer bag up to a month.
