With their concentrated sweet tomato flavor, roasted cherry or grape tomatoes are incredibly versatile. They make a great base for a quick pasta dish, a wonderful topping for a puff pastry tart, a great pizza or toast topping, a salsa ingredient, a taco garnish, and a frittata filler - and that's just for starters.
I most often use what I call my "quick-roasting" technique to cook them fast. I use a fairly hot oven, and I spread the tomato halves on a parchment-lined sheet pan with plenty of room around them. But sometimes I want the tomatoes to retain more of their moisture and feel a bit more jammy. That's when I put them into a baking dish with sides, I overcrowd them a bit, and I use a much lower oven temperature.
The slow roast takes an hour and a half or so, while the quick roast takes little more than a half hour. I think the quick-roasted are ultimately more flavorful, but because they brown and shrink a lot, you have to be careful in using them in preparations (like a tart) where they might be cooked again. The slow-roasted tomatoes come in handy for those recipes - and when you want to make something where the tomatoes will provide some moisture.
In this recipe, I've given you the full instructions for quick-roasting, followed by the slow-roast "variation."
Yields about 1 ¼ cups
- 1 pound cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes (mixed colors and varieties is nice), cut in half
- 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the parchment
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line a large heavy-duty rimmed sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper. Rub the parchment paper with some olive oil.
2. In a bowl, toss the cherry tomato halves very gently with the 2 tablespoons of oil and the kosher salt. Spread in one layer, cut side-up, on the sheet pan. (Transfer only the tomatoes to the sheet pan—leave behind any juices in the bowl as they will tend to burn on the sheet pan.)
3. Roast the tomatoes until they are browned around the edges and on the bottom and slightly puckered (they will collapse more out of the oven), about 25 minutes for smaller cherry tomatoes, 32 to 35 minutes for larger ones. (There will be some blackening on the sheet pan.)
4. Let the tomatoes cool for a couple minutes on the sheet pan. To remove, gently peel them away from the paper. If they are sticking, lift the paper up and pop the tomatoes off by pressing the paper from behind.
5. If not using right away, refrigerate, covered, for a week, or freeze, well-wrapped, for up to two months.
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Variation: Slow-Roasting
1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Have ready a baking dish (Pyrex works well) where the tomato halves will fit snugly into one layer. Rub the bottom of the pan with a bit of oil
2. In a bowl, toss the cherry tomato halves very gently with the 2 tablespoons of oil and the kosher salt. Spread them in the pan, cut side-up.
3. Roast until the tomatoes have shrunken and lost much of their moisture, but not all of it, about 90 minutes (but up to 2 hours depending on how reduced you want them to be).
4. Use a silicone spatula to gently scrape them out of the pan into a storage containter. Refrigerate for up to a week; freeze for up to two months.
