Slow-Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

This recipe for slow-roasted cherry tomatoes is a delicious, mostly hands-off way to use fresh, summer produce. Serve these roasted veggies as a condiment with sandwiches, stirred into pasta, or as a side dish!

Tomato season has arrived.

Every morning, I wake up, go down to the garden, and start picking tomatoes of all different shapes and sizes from their vines.

A few of the big, juicy tomatoes become tomato sandwiches, some go into ratatouille tian. Most get turned into tomatoes provençal, fire-roasted tomatoes, and yellow tomato marinara sauce, and then are frozen for winter.

My Roma tomatoes become San Marzano marinara sauce and bowl after bowl of fire-roasted salsa and mango habanero salsa.

Most of the tiny tomatoes go straight into my mouth (oops!), but today I found myself staring at SO MANY cherry tomatoes.

I snacked on a few, but the rest were piled in a bowl, waiting to be used.

Sometimes I add cherry tomatoes to a Greek Salad, and sometimes I make Tomato Corn Salad. But this time, I had something else in mind.

This recipe for slow-roasted cherry tomatoes is adapted from Dorie Greenspan's, and is one of my favorites from her book Around My French Table.

Why Slow-Roast cherry Tomatoes?

Slow-roasted cherry tomatoes are like a mix between sun-dried tomatoes and the most flavorful summer tomato on the planet.

Slow-roasting dries the tomatoes, concentrates all the sweet flavors, makes the best tomatoes taste even better, and makes even less-than-stellar-tasting tomatoes shine.

If you bought cherry tomatoes that are a little bland, or have late-season, less flavorful tomatoes from the garden, this is a perfect way to use them.

But, there's a problem.

Slow roasting is-- well, it's SLOW.

And since peak tomato season coincides exactly with the time of year when most of us dread turning on our ovens, you might hesitate to slow-roast tomatoes for an eyebrow-raising three hours.

Trust me, though, one bite, and it'll all be worth it.

Plus, you're roasting at an extra-low temperature, so it won't heat your kitchen up as much as you might think.

How to Use Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

I like to eat these straight, because I just can't get enough tomatoes in my life.

That said, these little beauties are also delicious IN your food. Use them as a condiment, and add them to anything that uses cooked tomatoes.

Try these slow-roasted tomato ideas:

• Stir them into pasta. Try adding them to my Lemon Spinach Pasta.
• Add them to a grilled cheese sandwich or cheese panini. They'd be amazing on this Brie grilled cheese sandwich.
• Use them as pizza topping on this Focaccia pizza (or really, any pizza).
• Add them to polenta or grits.

Enjoy these tomatoes however you like-- I'll be over here eating them straight from the pan!