Does your end-of-summer scramble include bushels of tomatoes? And vats of sauce steaming in a sweltering kitchen? Consider this Seat-of-the-Pants Tomato Confit instead of a tomato purée. Juicy ripe tomatoes bake slowly in a low oven until intensely flavorful, lightly caramelized yet tender to the bite. Stored in the freezer, they last for several months You’ll appreciate the flavors of August come leaf season on cooked vegetables and fresh mozzarella, crostini, antipasti plates, cooked beans, pasta and fresh mozzarella.
Each summer, we grow a dozen tomato plants. Usually a mixture of cherry, plum and heirloom varieties. Most years we purchase seedlings at the May Market run by the Essex Garden Club. (Its members use milk and juice cartons to raise the seeds each winter.) Because I was busy this spring, I got a late start and ended up with generic plum and slicing tomatoes. No matter. Slow roasting coaxes flavor out of Big Boys just as it does San Marzanos.
Slow roasting tomatoes works well whether you have 5 or 25 pounds of tomatoes. You can fill the oven with sheet pans of tomatoes and cook them in batches. I use a baking stone to create more even and gentle heat in our oven, but the tomato confit can be prepared without it. (If you are wondering, confit means to preserve. think confiture, French for fruit preserves. Savory confits are preserved with fat or oil.)
Pem McNerney, friend and Living Editor of Shore Publishing asked me whether the skins toughen using this method. That depends on the variety or tomato and their size among other things. The smaller the tomato, the more skin. Cherry tomatoes, for example, have a higher ratio of skin to flesh than a 12-ounce Beefsteak.
When oven roasting, you can adjust the length of cooking time to get a moist sauce or drier confit. When I have too many cherry tomatoes as I do this morning, I will bake them a short time, perhaps only an hour. This becomes a rough textured sauce. If I had left the batch pictured here in the oven another 15 minutes, I would have dehydrated them into leathery sun-dried tomatoes.
Here’s the tomato confit after one hour in the oven.
Seasoning the tomatoes when they come from the oven achieves a number of things. It allows you to add the right amount of salt. Season too much too early and you could end up with something inedible and salty. Salt balances acid. This makes salting at the end essential to adjust for the taste of your tomatoes.
Here’s the tomato confit after two + hours in the oven. There’s lots of condensed juices on the bottom of the pan.
When you’re packing the tomatoes for storage in the freezer, consider using glass canning jars. You may be tempted to use plastic containers but know that glass works just as well. The jars stack neatly in the freezer and, of course, they are reusable.
Here are some ideas of what to do with Seat-of-the-Pants Tomato Confit:
-As a topping on slices of toasted baguette spread with creamy feta.
-Tossed with cooked farro or gemelli pasta, toasted pine nuts and shredded basil
-Folded into curried rice with caramelized carrots, peas and dill
-On top of a baked sweet potato alongside a dollop of yogurt or sour cream
Kitchen Notebook
Silicone pan liners (or baking mats) make clean up a snap. I use silicone baking mats to roll out dough on my kitchen table. They also help concentrate juices when roasting anything. I used a black silicone liner provided to me by LéKué, a Spanish manufacturer of silicone bake and cook wear for home and commercial use. It has a ½-inch lip that I find useful for containing liquids on the sheet pan. Certainly not required but a helpful tool.
Does your end-of-summer scramble include bushels of tomatoes? And vats of sauce steaming in a sweltering kitchen? Consider this Seat-of-the-Pants Tomato Confit instead of a tomato purée. Juicy ripe tomatoes bake slowly in a low oven until intensely flavorful, lightly caramelized yet tender to the bite. Stored in the freezer, they last for several months You’ll appreciate the flavors of August come leaf season on cooked vegetables and fresh mozzarella, crostini, antipasti plates, cooked beans, pasta and fresh mozzarella.
Ingredients
5 pounds ripe tomatoes
6 – 8 large garlic cloves, peeled
½ cup (4 fluid ounces) olive oil
Fresh thyme sprigs
Salt and black pepper
Directions
- Place a baking stone on the middle rack of the oven. Preheat the oven to 300°F.
- Line a half sheet pan lined with a silicone mat or parchment paper.
- Wash and dry the tomatoes. Remove the stem end and any blemishes. Cut the tomatoes into wedges, about 1-inch thick. Squeeze out some of the seeds and juice.
- Place the tomato wedges on the sheet pan. Pour about half of the olive oil over the tomatoes.
- Slice the garlic cloves thinly. Scatter them over the tomatoes. Remove the leaves from several sprigs of fresh thyme and scatter them over the tomatoes. Toss the tomatoes to coat them with the oil, garlic and thyme.
- Season the tomatoes with a small amount of salt, some pepper and drizzle with the remaining olive oil.
- Bake the tomatoes for an hour. Check the tomatoes to gauge how much liquid they release. Depending on the tomato variety and their ripeness, there may be more or less liquid. Use a flat spatula to flip the tomatoes over and spread them into an even layer.
- Bake the tomatoes for another hour then check for moisture level and seasoning. They might be ready to use. Or return the tomatoes to the oven for another 15 – 30 minutes. The tomatoes are done when the liquid in the pan has evaporated and the tomatoes are pleasantly dry yet pliable.
- Taste the tomatoes and add more salt and pepper as needed to balance acidity and add flavor.
- Pack the tomatoes tightly into pint containers. Label and store them in the freezer where they will be fresh and ready to use for 3 – 4 months.
