These little babies date from early September. On our way home from Northampton, we swung by Red Fire Farm, our CSA farm, to exercise our pick-our-own rights. There were so. many. cherry. tomatoes. So we shared them with Ryan and Erik, who stuffed them whole and raw into quart jars with a few onions and covered them with olive oil and have been refrigerating them since.
When the whole thing is in storage, it looks a little less than appetizing. The oil hardens and looks a congealed. But brought up to room temperature, as you can see, the oil looks like oil and smells like summer.
The night we met last summer’s cherry tomatoes, we were having flatbreads. They would pull out a few, sort of smear here and there across the dough, then brush the whole thing with this fragrant oil. In retrospect, it seems like you could add herbs to the oil at the outset and have very flavorful oil indeed come April. It’s just a lot of oil to part with. I think that’s what prevented us from doing this ourselves at first, but we will definitely be doing it come cherry tomato season.
Our experiment, however, failed. Not sure why. We put whole tomatoes (not cherries) in a jar, covered in a simple salt brine, then filled the jar the rest of the way with oil. First, the expanding tomatoes pushed the oil up and out of the jar, leaving a huge mess where we had them stored. This month, when we went to open them, we found very tough, like, tomato husks. They were like hollow little footballs in the shape of tomatoes. It may be that they have a shorter shelf life. But we won’t be wasting tomatoes like that again.
I slow-roasted tomatoes this summer (4-6 hrs at 200F in the oven, with a bit of oil, salt and pepper), and they stored great in the freezer. I just made sure to stack them and remove all the air from the freezer bags. I’ve been throwing them in sauces and pasta all winter. I just wish I had made more! I’ve gone through all 10lbs already.
That’s a bummer! I agree with Iora, I love to slow-roast and freeze my tomatoes. I always do up a couple of batches with garlic cloves, and sometimes onions, then I’ll defrost them to use as a base for a delicious tomato soup. Add milk, heat and blend - easy and so tasty!
I wonder if the tomatoes rotted from the inside — there is so much moisture inside that they could ferment, even though they’re protected from oxygen.
I canned a lot of tomatoes last summer which was a big pain in the arse, but I’m so glad I have them now…
I dry cherry tomatoes in the dehydrator (cut in half). They are great in soup or on salads. It’s the only way I’ve found to keep pace with cherry tomato plant production and use them all. You can also make your dried tomatoes into powder with a food processor (a trick I learned in Saveur), which is a really tasty flavor base. Somehow adding the tomato powder to soup is deeper and not as tomato-y as adding canned tomatoes.
You kept your oiled tomatoes in the fridge, right? Oil + garlic or onions can breed botulism at room temperature.