First of all, congratulations to Orangette, the blog that Molly Wizenberg writes in Seattle, on winning the Best Overall Food Blog award in the 2005 Food Blog Awards! Today's recipe is borrowed straight from Orangette's inexhaustible list of dishes, each of which looks more delicious than the last. It is also dedicated to Rosmariini of Pastanjauhantaa, a well-known great friend of the tomato.
When I wrote about caramelised onions I was already a little worried about what people would think of a cooking time of four hours, which felt staggeringly long. Today I console myself with the thought that the end of the hard frosts has eased the load on Fingrid, the company that runs the Finnish national grid, so keeping my electric oven on for nine hours at a stretch is presumably not morally questionable... Last week, in the cold, the country used more electricity than ever before, and Fingrid was already warning of a power shortage. I would not have had the nerve then. Unlike the onions, tomatoes fortunately do not need stirring, so there is no need to stand guard by the oven. I put mine in during the afternoon, and it is now past midnight.
Many people think the tomatoes of today watery and tasteless, and I have to admit that I buy fresh tomatoes fairly seldom myself. These were ordinary shop tomatoes too, and the wedge I tasted raw was every bit as watery as I had expected. Sun-dried tomatoes are tasty but often absurdly expensive, or, when drowned in olive oil, rather heavy eating. When tomato halves are kept in a low oven for a long time, a great deal of water evaporates from them. What is left is a half shrunk to about a third, which for all its simplicity is astonishingly aromatic. The concentrated sweet acidity of the tomatoes practically forces you to nibble them straight off the baking tray. A quarter of mine had gone before the rest had even cooled.
In Orangette's recipe the oven is at 200 degrees Fahrenheit, a little under a hundred Celsius, and the tomatoes take four to six hours. She recommends plum tomatoes, but I had ten ordinary round ones, and their halves just filled one baking tray. At six hours I went and tasted one, and it was still watery in the middle, so I left them at a hundred degrees for the full nine hours. In the finished halves the skin has wrinkled, and grains of salt can still be made out on the cut surface. The coriander in Orangette's recipe is ground, and she says she got the idea in Paris.
Recipe card
Oven-Dried Tomatoes
- one baking tray
- Oven 100 °C
- Baking 6-9 hours
You will need
| about 1 kg | ripe (plum) tomatoes |
| olive oil | |
| sea salt | |
| dried coriander |
Method
- Set the oven to heat to 100 °C.
- Wash the tomatoes, halve them lengthwise and cut out the stem ends.
- Arrange the tomato halves on a baking tray lined with baking parchment, cut side up.
- Brush lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt and coriander.
- Bake in the middle of the oven for 6-9 hours, or until the tomatoes have shrunk to a third of their original size but are still juicy.
Keep the tomatoes in the fridge in an airtight container.
Keep the tomatoes in the fridge in an airtight container. They are good as they are as a side dish, in salads, with pizza or pasta, or anywhere else in place of sun-dried tomatoes. Orangette puts them in hamburgers and calls them ketchup for grown-ups.
6 comments
Näyttävät tosi syötäviltä - jopa mun ruokahalu herää! Oon joskus itsekin tehnyt noita parhaaseen tomaattisesonkiin, muuten samat höysteet mutta olen ruikannut päälle vielä vähän balsamietikkaa.
ZZ
On kyllä hyvän näköisiä tomaatteja. Hyvä vain, että jossain postaillaan näitä vähän pidemmän kaavan mukaan valmistettavia ruokia.
Oi, minulle omistettuja tomaatteja! Tuossahan olisi hyvä taustakuva läppäriini. 🙂 Pitääpä tehdä noita itsekin, kun tomaattikokkausta (eikä varsinkaan tomaattibloggausta) ole koskaan liikaa.
Kieltämättä varsinkin näin talviaikaan tuoreiden tomaattien mauttomuus saattaa joskus hieman lannistaa, mutta onneksi säilyketomaateissa on aina sekä makua että luonnetta.
Ja hienoa, että ruokabloggaus on maailmalla noin kova sana.
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