Roma tomatoes with rosemary and oregano all ready to pop in the oven. Your house might just smell like an Italian kitchen in about thirty minutes.
Sun-dried tomatoes add a zesty excitement to your Italian dishes and are easy to make at home in your oven. I have experimented with different types of tomatoes and found that I prefer cherry, plum, and Roma tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes look more like red raisins when they’re done, and they’re an exceptional salad topping. Larger plum and Roma tomatoes add inspiration to pasta dishes and put more zah in pizza. Make sure you use similarly sized tomatoes for best results.
Ingredients:
12-18 Roma or plum tomatoes or 24-36 cherry tomatoes
2 tablespoons garlic powder, more or less to taste
Fresh cracked pepper to taste
Kosher salt (optional)
Several fresh sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and oregano/or/ same dried herbs
Extra virgin olive oil
Preheat the oven to 250 F. Put a rack on a baking sheet. (I used a cooling rack). Halve tomatoes lengthwise and lay on the rack skin-side down. Generously sprinkle with garlic powder, freshly ground black pepper, and kosher salt (I am as sodium-free as possible and don’t use salt at all, and they came out just fine). Place fresh herb sprigs over the top of the tomatoes. (I used homegrown rosemary, thyme, and oregano, but you can shake on dried herbs). Roast until tomatoes are barely moist and quite shriveled, anywhere from two hours for cherry tomatoes to seven hours for Roma tomatoes, depending on their size. Allow to cool. Pack oven-dried tomatoes tightly in a sealed jar drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and keep in the fridge. I don’t know how long they’ll keep – I ate mine within a few days.
