Oven Roasted Tomatoes

This morning I finally had time to get around to the basket of little tomatoes I got from my father in law's garden.  There wasn't enough to haul out the canner and make sauce.  I had just a little over a pound to work with.  These are Dennis's own variety of tomatoes that he calls a Long Cherry.  They are bigger than a cherry but smaller than a plum and obviously oblong in shape.  They are nice and fleshy, very little seed goo so they are great for cooking.  Perfect for this particular application.

It's pretty straight forward.  I've found a few recipes for this on Pinterest.  Because my tomatoes don't really fit the criteria of either cherry or plum and they're somewhere in between, I decided to use the recipes as a guideline and not a hard and fast rule. The sites I got the recipes from are oven roasted cherry tomatoes @ Blissfully Content Blog and oven roasted Roma tomatoes @ Food in Jars Blog.

Basically, all you do is wash off any dirt and cut off any shriveled or mushy parts (assuming that you're like me and have had your tomatoes sitting for a bit to finish ripening and then forgot about them.  Otherwise you can skip the whole cutting off the icky parts step).  Then slice them in half the long way.  Arrange in a single layer on a parchment lined rimmed cookie sheet.  Give a generous drizzle of oil and sprinkle of salt.  Most recipes call for olive oil.  I use sunflower oil because it's what I have on hand.  I happened to have a snazzy Himalayan pink salt grinder from Costco, so I used that.  Any coarse salt works.

Put them in the oven at 250 degrees for about 3-4 hours until they have reduced to about 1/3 their original size.  Here's where I'm going out on my own.  Recipes for plum tomatoes say 200 degrees for 10-12 hours.  Cherry tomatoes say 300 degrees for 2 hours.  I'm going to split the difference.  

Let them cool completely then pop the whole pan in the freezer to flash freeze.  Once they're frozen, transfer them to a Ziploc bag and store in the freezer. (The last time I did these, I put some of them in a jar of olive oil in my fridge as the recipe said.  They molded.  I was bummed.  That pint jar had a lot of tomatoes and a lot of good quality -read: expensive- olive oil in it.  I'll stick to freezing them.)

Pull out a few and give them a rough chop and add them to any dish that can benefit from a nice shot of concentrated tomato flavor. I like to toss a few of them in with my carrot/celery/onion at the beginning of making a stew and let them melt in with the other veggies.  If you're a fancy hors d'oeuvres type, you can put them on a slice of baguette with a smear of goat cheese.

Enjoy!

Happy Monday Everyone :)