Oven Roasted Romas
I should be telling you, dear reader, how wonderful the San Marzano tomatoes I planted in my garden are. I should be explaining in detail how bold and beautiful their bright, ruby-red color is. I might also mention their glossy un-waxed skin and the almost ethereal fragrant natural tomato aroma. I would probably go on to say that they are so good, we eat them like apples. Imagining them makes me swoon. I should be telling you all this, but I am not. It was not to be in 2008. If you read my Pesto post, then you know that a combination of bad weather and vine-fruit loving squirrels decimated my crop. So, I am left to buy up tomatoes when I find good ones in quantity.
If I happen to pass the Romas at one of our local grocery stores and they look particularly lovely and are reasonably priced, then I will buy five to ten pounds, and if I’m feeling frisky, then I will I buy twenty pounds. I make fresh tomato sauce and lots of it. Most goes into the freezer for special occasions, or for when we’re feeling lazy. It goes so quickly… Jenna eats it right out of the pot before it is even finished cooking (I keep her at bay with my wooden spoon). I also love to roast them Slow roasted Romas rock, plain and simple.
Romas Roasting in the Oven
This technique has been around for ages. I stumbled upon it completely by accident while I was living in Manhattan in the late nineties and I have been making them in some form or fashion ever since. I ate at a small Italian place in the city for lunch one day and had the most fantastic roasted Romas with my antipasto. When I asked the server how in the world they made these things taste soooo yummy, she sheepishly admitted that they bought them! “Fire Roasted San Marzano Tomatoes,” she said they were called. “They come in a big jar.” Well, I figured, how hard can it be, right?
There are two schools of thought on this; short cooking time (1 to 3 hours) and long cooking time (6+ hours). I’ve seen some folks say they cook them for twelve hours… Cooking temperatures vary as well – it all depends on how you like them. The lower the temperature, the more you will dry the tomatoes, rather than cook them. In each recipe, tomatoes are halved and placed on a foil lined sheet pan (see slide show below for before and after photos). I brush lightly with oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper and whatever herbs tickle my fancy at the time (fresh or dried, your call, but usually one or more of the following: thyme, rubbed sage, rosemary, corriander, basil, etc.). Beware of over-powering things like fennel seed, cumin, or turmeric. I also add chopped garlic, which roasts slowly and enhances the flavor. Omit it if you want to. You can brush on some vinegar too if you want to add some acidity.
These babies go right into the oven (275 degrees for three hours or 200 degrees for 6 hours) and cook slowly. All we’re trying to do here is dry out the tomatoes and concentrate their flavor. I have found that cooking them lower and slower creates more of the richer flavor profile I equate with tomato paste, while cooking them hotter and faster gives them more of a fresh, tomato taste. I usually prefer the latter, depending on what I plan to use them for of course. Be aware that fresh herbs (like basil) will tend to burn when using the hotter, faster method.
One of the best things about these is they freeze well! In researching this, I found recipes in several of the cookbooks I own, and there are probably more I didn’t find. Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller refer to them as tomato confit and cook them only for an hour or two at 200 - 250 degrees. Tyler Florence cooks them for three hours at 300 degrees while Michael Chiarello cooks them at 250 degrees for 5 to 8 hours. I’m sure that many folks have blogged about roasting tomatoes as well. As for me, the tomato flavor is so concentrated after the roasting/drying process, I find that they are devine.
They are versatile, too – if you have any leftover following your first trial run, try replacing the raw tomato in your next pasta dish with these babies, stack them on sandwiches (hot or cold), serve them with anti pasta, julienne for garnish on pretty much anything (where you would normally use tomato), serve with a piece of bread, some cheese and a glass of wine on Sunday afternoon, toss them in a salad, garnish a Caesar, build a salad around them, blend them into your next hummus – the possibilities are endless.
Store them for a week or so in the fridge. You can cover them with olive oil if you like and they will keep longer. If you do, process a couple of the tomatoes with the oil you cover them with to make a wonderful tomato oil you can use on salads and to garnish plates.
Enjoy.