Cherry Tomato Confit

So now that we have tomatoes coming out of our ears, it's time to start doing something with them. This year, we have three heirloom tomatoes for slicing and eating: green zebra, West Virginia hillbilly, and German yellow. Two roma plants are going to provide great tomatoes for sauce and a gargantuan Sweet 100 cherry tomato plant has yielded about three gallons of cherry tomatoes so far. Once we have eaten all the cherry tomatoes we can handle, the next step is to preserve the cherry tomatoes, since they go rotten pretty fast.


I prefer to roast them in the oven in about 1/4" of olive oil to "confit" them. Arrange washed cherry tomatoes on a sheet pan, generously season with salt and pepper, sprinkle over some fresh herbs (I used thyme and oregano from the garden), and pour over olive oil until you have about 1/4" in the pan. The tomatoes and herbs will also flavor the oil, which you can use for cooking. Roast in a 300 degree oven until they are starting to carmelize, 2-3 hours.

These will keep in the refrigerator for about a week. Use them on everything: toast, in pasta, a spoonful on your mouth, anything! When we were sailing, we grilled some shrimp in the shell until they were rare, peeled them, then finished sauteeing them in a pan with these tomatoes and oil, and they were to die for!