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!