THE MINIMALIST; Roasted Tomatoes: Putting Your Taste Buds on Full Alert (Published 2001) (2024)

THIS year's tomatoes are good. So good that you might ask, why bother to roast them?

But the same fine weather that helps produce meaty tomatoes, good for eating, also produces relatively dry tomatoes, which take perfectly to fast roasting. Not that a roasted tomato is better than a raw one. It's just different: concentrated, intense, with more flavor and less liquid per bite, making it useful, with little or no further cooking, in any dish where you want a strong tomato flavor without all of that juice.

I'm not talking about oven-drying tomatoes here, that painfully slow, magical process that converts plum tomatoes and their juices into something nearly as sweet as candy but takes all day. I'm talking about a fast and easy technique, blasting tomatoes out of their skins with a 30-minute dose of high heat that concentrates their liquids and chars their exteriors.

Plum or Roma tomatoes are the usual varieties of choice for this procedure, though if you're lucky you can find other, perhaps more interesting meaty tomatoes at farmers' markets or in friends' gardens; what you're looking for is a high percentage of flesh, as opposed to pulp, seeds or juice.

The process itself is extremely simple: You core the tomatoes, then split them. Taking the extra step needed to remove their skins is unnecessary, because you can just slip the skins off after they've roasted.

Then you have a choice: You can remove the pulp and seeds, and the result will be drier and perhaps a little more intense in flavor. Or you can leave them in, giving you roasted tomatoes that are juicier, but with their seeds. In either case, it's better to roast the tomatoes flesh down, which produces drier, more charred tomatoes, and those from which the skin is most easily removed.

The only other ingredients are olive oil -- at least a quarter-cup per dozen tomatoes, and more if you like, because it becomes deliciously flavored and can even be used without the tomatoes after cooking. And you need an herb, like thyme or rosemary.