Easy Tomato Confit
A how-to for all that late summer tomato-y bounty
It’s here: a time of year we all wait for, pomodoro-palooza, peak tomato season. Sure, tomatoes have been showing up in the markets for a bit by now, but this end-of-summer moment is the very best time for these gifts of nature.
There are few things that evoke a season more than a perfectly ripe tomato, and we wait all year for our first bite of this heavenly, vegetable-y fruit. But, after a few days of naked tomatoes with little more than a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt, we start craving more creative ways to use the bounty—especially if we have an avowed raw tomato hater in our midst (we won’t name names).
This week we’re evangelizing a time-honored tomato-cooking method, a version of which became one of Fanny’s most viral recipes ever: the slow-cooked, tomato confit.
Pack a roasting dish or pan with ripe tomatoes, garlic, and herbs, and pop it in the oven at a low temperature for a couple of hours. The result? Savory tomatoes whose sweetness has been concentrated into something approaching ambrosia. Confited tomatoes are, of course, tasty on their own, but we love to make a big batch to have on hand for a week of easy, delicious cooking and eating. Best of all, this perfect recipe works as well with a mere pint of cherry tomatoes as it does with a flat of large, succulent heirlooms.
To confit, a primer:
To confit something means to cook it submerged in oil or fat, slowly and over a long period (historically, as a method of preservation). People often associate “confit” with things like duck legs or meat, but you can confit vegetables too! This recipe falls somewhere between a confit and a slow roast—the amount of oil neither covers the tomatoes entirely nor merely coats them. The flavor concentrates as it would if you simply slow-roasted them, but something altogether more magical transpires when there’s enough oil to keep the moisture locked in for longer as they simmer away. See more in Fanny’s IG highlight that is entirely dedicated to the art (and worship) of tomato confit.
Easy Tomato Confit
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 2–3 hours
Ripe tomatoes of any variety (the sweeter the better!)
Lots of garlic cloves
Fresh basil and/or marjoram or oregano
Olive oil (choose something that is not too pungent or bitter—a medium-bodied oil works best here)
How to make Tomato Confit
1. Heat your oven to 300°F.
2. Clean and remove stems from the tomatoes. If your tomatoes are large, simply remove the stems, core them and place them whole and upside-down in your ovenproof dish.
3. Peel several cloves of garlic and nestle them in between the tomatoes.
4. Add some basil, marjoram, or oregano leaves, tucking them underneath and around the tomatoes (you can totally skip the herbs—it’ll still taste great).
5. Add a generous sprinkle of fine sea salt and *PLENTY* of good olive oil. Don’t drown them but make sure the oil comes at least ?–? up the tomatoes.
6. Place in the center of your oven and forget about them for an hour.
7. After an hour, check on them to make sure all is going swimmingly. They shouldn’t be scorching or browning excessively, just bubbling away gently and beginning to collapse. Gently turn with a spoon.
8. After 2–3 hours they should be done: wrinkly, juicy, sweet, caramelized, concentrated and delicious. If they don’t taste like they’re quite there yet, return them to the oven and cook for longer to reduce more liquid.
9. Once cool, eat, or store with the liquid in an airtight glass container in the fridge. They’ll keep well for a week (if they last that long!)
Great Jones King Sear
We love using our Great Jones King Sear frying pan for this preparation: it holds heat evenly and allows tomatoes to be submerged but not drowned in oil.
Hi! We’re Fanny and Greta, dear friends with deep backgrounds in sustainable food—who also happened to have had babies within a month of each other in 2022. With toddlers now in our arms, we’re in the thick of figuring out how to introduce our kids to yet more of the world of food while also feeding the rest of our families and, you know, working, and occasionally bathing ourselves. As everyone who has come before us well knows, this is a genuine challenge, so we launched the Green Spoon as a way to capture our learnings in real time and create a place for parental solidarity.
