Recipe: Here’s how to slow roast vine-on tomatoes

Once they're roasted, you can serve the orbs atop fresh burrata cheese with coarse salt and basil pesto.

Nancy Silverton, chef, restaurateur and cookbook author, slow-roasts tomatoes to perfection. She uses small, on-the-vine tomatoes and slow roasts the colorful orbs slathered with extra-virgin olive oil. Their skins shrivel but the tomatoes remain plump.

There are myriad ways to serve them. Once cooled, the room-temp, stem-on tomatoes can sit atop a generous mound of rich fresh burrata cheese graced with coarse salt and a smidgen of basil pesto.

I also like to serve them atop cooked store-bought ravioli that has been tossed with olive oil or lemon olive oil and minced fresh herbs (such as basil and parsley), seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper. I garnish the dish with slivers of pitted Kalamata olives.

Slow-Roasted Vine-On Tomatoes

INGREDIENTS

16 ounces small vine-on tomatoes, such as Campari tomatoes, or cherry tomatoes

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS

Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Place a wire rack on top of a baking sheet. Gently lift tomatoes out of boxes, taking care to keep tomatoes attached to stems as much as possible and place on rack. Brush tomatoes with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast in preheated oven until skins are shriveled but tomatoes are still plump, about 1 to 1½ hours.

Remove tomatoes from oven and allow them to cool to room temperature. Use tomatoes immediately, or cover with plastic wrap and store at room temperature for up to one day or refrigerate up to three days. Bring tomatoes to room temperature before serving.

— “The Mozza Cookbook” by Nancy Silverton with Matt Molina and Carolynn Carreno (Knopf, $35)