Oven-Dried Tomatoes
When I worked in corporate catering, I most often found myself slicing fruit for breakfast platters. Give me a honeydew melon today and I’ll go to town; you’ll have perfectly-arranged slices, decorated with strawberries, in no time. Sure, I got good at it (you’d too if you faced down five of them every morning, along with pineapples and cantaloupes), but what I really looked forward to doing at work was roasting tomatoes.
Because it was the dead of winter when we cooked, the roma tomatoes we received were less than desirable. In fact, they were largely inedible; “Winter Whites,” I believe my friend Jacques once called them. To render them palatable, my Chef Jared suggested we roast them slowly in the oven.
“You really want to dry them out,” he explained in his urgent, precise way of speaking. And, because he knew I needed to hear things twice: “You really need to dry them out.”
“Uh huh. Okay. Yup! Sure. Definitely!” I’d respond, half-listening and half-thinking about what I was going to have for lunch. He’d look at me critically, with a slight twinkle in his eye and I’d trot off to my station. Once I cored and halved all of the tomatoes, my wrist would stop moving. What happens now? Herbs? Oil? Temperature? I roasted tomatoes for so many events, I usually ignored his specific instructions and had to pop back over to his cutting board to ask whether garlic should be included this time and at what temperature they should be cooked. He always answered specifically and clearly: no sense in getting things wrong just because his greenest cook couldn’t listen.
We tweaked the recipe so many times I can’t possibly remember which variety was our favorite. Whether or not we picked the thyme before throwing it over the roma tomatoes or if we set the convection oven’s fan to low or high is, however, irrelevant. What I loved about Jared’s and my roasted tomatoes was the way their firm, mealy flesh transformed into lush, intensely flavored treats. We typically layered them in sandwiches with eggplant, squash and ciabatta bread. But this week, as I passed a display of particularly nice-looking romas, I remembered my old job and saw no reason why they couldn’t be enjoyed in a spinach salad.
I tossed the tomatoes with oil, thyme (which Jared always used), oregano (which he never did) and salt and pepper. They baked slowly in the oven for hours, warming the kitchen ever so slightly and weaving a familiarly comforting scent all the way into the stairwell halfway around the house.
I ate one fresh from the oven and while it was very good indeed, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness and nostalgia for December’s Winter Whites. It wasn’t so much the tomato I missed as it was the best Chef I’d ever worked with.
Jared’s Tomatoes
Core and halve some roma tomatoes. Toss them with extra virgin olive oil (don’t you dare use canola), whatever herbs you desire (I like fresh thyme, garlic – Jared always had confit garlic lying around, though raw and crushed is fine – and basil) kosher salt and pepper. Arrange them on a cooling rack set over a sheet pan, cut-side down. Bake for 4 hours at 200 degrees. Remove the skin, or don’t, and use in sandwiches, salads, or as part of a tapas-style spread.