why roasted tomatoes are a good idea

I have hated tomatoes all my life, so it’s probably weird for me to extol the virtues of roasted tomatoes, but in the words of Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” I hate raw tomatoes. There is something about the way they smell that never fails to make me gag, and that oozing gelatinous goo in their centers tends to make me want to die, but I can handle them okay in other forms (except stewed tomatoes, which may possibly be more vile than their raw counterparts). I like salsa. It’s cool. Whatever.

Over this past year, I’ve been cooking a lot more, because it’s not like I don’t have time, and I’ve tried roasting a lot of things. I’ve roasted garlic and peppers and even the occasional onion, and once I decided to give roasted tomatoes a try, and you know what? I love roasted tomatoes. Somehow everything that I find gross about a raw tomato doesn’t bother me when a tomato is roasted. I don’t notice that tomato smell, and the gelatinous goo is no more. Also, roasting heightens the flavor, so they end up tasting like bursts of awesome. I’m all in favor of roasted tomatoes.

If you’ve never roasted tomatoes before, you should give it a try. Even if you discover that you don’t want to just stand in your kitchen eating them straight off the pan like I do, there are several uses for them. They make colorful, tasty pizza toppings. They’re good in salads, and I bet they’d be great tossed in some pasta, but since my diet is largely gluten-free these days (though kind of just incidentally and not militantly, as it’s not a health-related issue for me, so I guess I could say that it’s really more just low-gluten), I haven’t eaten pasta in ages. But I made dinner earlier this week with ribbons of zucchini and yellow squash and tossed it with roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic, a little butter and some fresh basil and IT WAS SO GOOD. So there’s that. Today I’m making pesto out of them. (Or the ones I don’t eat right off the pan when they come out of the oven, that is.)

How do you roast a tomato? It’s so easy. I like to use grape tomatoes because they’re small and they don’t take very long, but other varieties are okay too, though I’d probably never try it with those big beefsteak tomatoes. The first thing to do is to heat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Then cut the tomatoes in half (if you’re using bigger ones, I guess you should quarter them, though if you use roma tomatoes you could probably just halve those) and place them face-up on a foil-lined baking sheet. About one package of grape tomatoes will fill a sheet pan. Once you’ve gotten them all lined up, drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. I like to use sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, but use whatever’s handy. Once you’ve done that, it’ll look like this:

At this point, if you wanted to be fancy, you could also add some garlic cloves (leave their papers on them) or tear up some fresh basil leaves and sprinkle those things around, or you could go ahead and not do that. I think some people insist on the garlic, but honestly, the garlic usually can’t stand up to being roasted in individual cloves and without the protection of being wrapped in foil, so even though you might be able to eke some roasted garlic out of larger cloves, what you typically end up with is a bunch of charred black garlic rocks on the pan, which kind of irritates me (perhaps irrationally), because it seems like a waste of perfectly good garlic and I don’t notice that it imparts that much flavor. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I have no argument against using fresh herbs, however.

Once you have your prep work done, place the tomatoes in the oven and let them do their thing. With grape tomatoes, this whole process takes about an hour or so. I usually check after an hour and if they’re not done, I let them go a little longer. Brilliant.

When they are done, they’ll look shriveled and slightly charred. Like this:

All that sci-fi goo will caramelize and they’ll be sweet and the pepper will give them a little kick (depending on how much you use and how you define “kick”). You could let them cool or you could dive right in. I won’t judge you.

So if all you want are roasted tomatoes, then you’re all done. If you want to make pesto out of them, carry on like so:

To a food processor (or I think a blender would work), add the tomatoes and the following:

3 large garlic cloves or about 6 small ones
between 5-10 fresh basil leaves
fresh Italian parsley (not a lot, about 8-10 leaves)
a handful of pine nuts, or I used whole natural almonds, toasted
extra virgin olive oil (about 1/2 cup)

(You can add other things, like some onion, or some red pepper flakes or Parmesan cheese or more salt & pepper, but I didn’t add any of these. I did throw in about 1/4 of a sweet yellow pepper, though. Also, sorry I’m terrible at measuring. I like to throw stuff together until it works. This means I usually don’t know exactly how much I use of anything, because I just put stuff together until it looks right and tastes good, unless I’m baking and then I measure. So you might want to go lighter on the oil and then add more as necessary.)

Pulse together until it’s the right consistency, meaning there are no big chunks of anything and it’s a kind of paste. It’ll look like this:

And then I put it into a jar because I like to reuse jars. Like so:

The end.