Tomato Confit

So, it’s tomato season, and you have a huge number of fresh tomatoes. What do you do? Sure, they’re great just sliced with a bit of salt, but, don’t you want to save some of that bright summer flavor for later? We do. Plus, as you saw yesterday, when we get tomatoes, we get a serious amount of tomatoes. So, we’re always looking for ways to store some of those tomatoes for later. Even if later might be just later this week.

To start our tomato processing, we figured we’d go with one of the easiest methods of dealing with tomatoes: make confit. Now, we’ve made what’s essentially a version of this before, which we called Roasted Plum Tomatoes. But, this time, we thought that we’d make a variation, a Thomas Keller variation, well, really a variation on a Thomas Keller recipe for Tomato Confit. The idea for this version comes from The French Laundry Cookbook, but we changed it to make it easier — we had a lot of tomatoes — and to match what we had available. We did away with peeling the tomatoes — if we were making the Keller recipe, we’d have peeled — and used rosemary instead of thyme, because we have fresh rosemary.

Ingredient discussion:

With fresh, really fresh, ripe, tasty tomatoes, the fewer ingredients you add, the better. But, with just a few ingredients, try for the best you can. Get good olive oil, fresh rosemary, and grind the pepper yourself. As an aside, before we purchased a pepper mill, we didn’t really use pepper all that much; we had a small can for years. Years! But, now, we probably go through a half a pound of pepper each year. Freshly ground really is that much better.

Procedure in detail:

Preheat oven to 200°F. Yes, just 200°F. Very low and very slow is the way we want to go.

Halve tomatoes. You can peel the tomatoes if you want; we didn’t. To peel, cut an “x” in the end and drop them, a few at a time, into boiling water for a few seconds. Remove with a slotted spoon, let cool, and the skin will slip off. We just had a lot of tomatoes to deal with that day, so we sliced them in half lengthwise, cut out any large tough cores (and any bad spots), and placed them cut side up on a rimmed baking sheet. You can pack them pretty close together to fit a lot on a sheet.

Drizzle oil. Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes, making sure to fill any nooks and crannies with delicious olive oil. The amount to use is really up to you, but figure at least 1/4 cup, possibly as much as half a cup. Don’t worry, it won’t go to waste.

Top. Cut the sprigs of rosemary into multiple pieces and distribute over the top of the tomatoes, and, if you want, press them into the tomatoes. Now, sprinkle with salt. We used kosher salt, but sea salt will be great, too. Sprinkle with freshly ground black pepper, too. You know how much you like.

Roast. Place in the oven and roast for 5-6 hours. Yes, hours. Don’t worry, the temperature is so low you never really have to check on them. Just let them go, but, if you’re roasting a couple of pans, rotate them from top to bottom and front to back a few times. When and how often isn’t critical.

Pack. Let the tomatoes cool a bit, then pluck off and discard the rosemary sprigs. Pack the tomato halves into containers and top with oil. Refrigerate (or freeze, if you have a lot more than you can eat in the next week or so).

Roasting tomatoes concentrates the flavors, and, by roasting at a low temperature, they don’t take on that cooked taste — not that that’s bad, mind you, it’s just that for these, it’s nice to have that fresh tomato taste. These are easy-peasy, and, even with the skins left on, quite good. We’ll say five stars because we were able to fit 6 pounds of tomatoes into about 4 cups.