What’s even better than regular tomatoes in a salad: dried tomatoes. Easy to do — maximum effect. Try it once and you’ll be hooked.
Score the skin of any number of your favourite toms. Then dip em in boiling water for no more than 20 seconds. After that, the skin should come off easily.
Halve the tomatoes and scoop out the wet bits. Eat the wet bits — they’re packed with vitamin C — or add them to your bolognese. Arrange the tomato halves on a greased baking tray and sprinkle with “hard” herbs, fresh garlic and some sea salt. Roast in a cool-ish oven for many hours. Four hours at 120°C is a nice start, but 24 hours @ 80 degrees is better. The end result depends on your oven, but the lower you set it, the better the outcome (providing you’ll roast em for longer). And of course your toms are less likely to burn in a cool oven.
At some point you may want to turn the tomatoes over. Also, be sure to discard most of the herbs and garlic after roasting.
Dried tomatoes like these will keep for a couple of weeks when immersed in oil. However: why not add them all to your mediterranean-style salad or eat the leftovers as tapas with a glass of wine?
They sound really good, but what are hard herbs? are we talking parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme? and would you use black pepper too?
AV
Interesting, though I’m more interested in very long-term savings (such as pickled tomatoes).
What’s the point of drying tomatoes, if you can eat them raw and get more nutrients?
About the only case I can see is if you have an abundance of tomatoes and can’t possible eat them all in a few days, they don’t fit in your fridge and well, you have a free oven.
Not trying to be snarky, just curious: I’m a mindful eater, who prefers less prepared food, than otherwise.
Cheers.
LOL Pickled tomatoes? But you hate vinegar, how’s that gonna work?
The point of drying, for me anyway, would be for something different, a different taste, texture, look.
AV
Hard herbs ? This is Cannibis! Maybe it’s a way to get the Irish hubbies eating salads?
Irish hubbies eating salads, perish the thought!
I think, due to the fact that the author of this article is a nob, we should ignore the phrase hard herbs and replace it with something less pretentious!
I suggest any combination of rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano would be great with tomato.
To answer your question, there are tomato conservation recipies that involve hot brine, not vinegar, as far as I remember. Yes, it’s tricky and requires lots of effort, but still doable by a dedicated party.
I’ll try drying the tomatos in autumn, when there’s plenty of them and they are very cheap (actually, nothing’s cheap nowadays, but oh well).
Autumn eh? My toms will have developed a good layer of green fuzz by then, Yura.
Still, I’m curious.
Note to AV: yeah I meant the firm small-leaf stuff like thyme or rosemary, not the chopped floppy-leaf stuff like (flatleaf) parsley or even chives.
Cooked tomatoes contain more antioxidants than raw tomatoes. And you’re basically slow cooking these, so raw tomatoes don’t really have an advantage. The other thing is that roasting them really intensifies the flavour. Sunblush tomatoes (roasted & stored in oil) taste amazing. So that would be the point of making these.
Rosemary would be a hard herb, as opposed to fresh basil, which would be a soft herb. But use what you want, you’re the one that’s going to be eating it!
I like the cannabis comment. One of our drugs workers asked some kids which they thought were ‘hard drugs’ and which were ‘soft drugs’. They decided that cannabis resin was the hardest drug because it’s a solid block of resin as opposed to a powder. Cute…