There have been so many tomatoes turning red on my tomato vines the past couple of weeks, I’ve been roasting tomatoes like crazy. If you’ve always wanted to know how to roast tomatoes, it’s super easy and there’s no blanching, scooping out of seeds or food waste. Once you’ve roasted tomatoes, you can make your own marinara sauce, pizza sauce, or tomato soup. Freshly roasted tomatoes taste so much better than those from a can you’ll be wishing you could grow tomatoes all year-round.

If you’re getting to the end of tomato picking, harvest all of your ripe tomatoes. Or your not so ripe tomatoes. At the end of last tomato season, I roasted all of our  remaining tomatoes, before they froze on the vine. Toss a few green tomatoes onto your roasting pan with your red ones and no one will notice.

How to Roast Tomatoes

Ingredients

• tomatoes – lots or little – either is fine
• canola oil (or other oil you like to cook with)
• salt and pepper (and red pepper flakes if you’d like to spice it up)
• basil, thyme, green peppers – optional

Directions

Pull the green stems off and slice your tomatoes in half. No need to remove the seeds and don’t even think about blanching them.

Place the tomatoes on a baking sheet or jelly roll pan that’s been sprayed with a baking spray or just brush it with canola oil.

For cherry tomatoes, don’t do anything. Just put them on the sheet to fill in your empty spaces from your slicing tomatoes.

Drizzle (don’t drown) the tomatoes with canola oil and brush it around. The oil is really to keep the spices on the tomatoes. Then sprinkle the tomatoes with salt, pepper, or other spices you might like. I like to add red pepper flakes to give the tomatoes a little kick.

Tossed in for fun were a few basil leaves from the garden. You can also add green peppers or thyme, if you have those growing in your garden.

I had lots of tomatoes to roast!

Place the jelly roll pans filled with tomatoes in a pre-heated 400 degree oven. Bake for 30 minutes.

Once the tomatoes have baked for 30 minutes, set the oven to broil and roast your tomatoes for 5 minutes.

After you’ve removed the tomatoes from the oven and let them cool, run them through your food processor or blender, skins, liquid and all.

Either a blender or a food processor works well. If I’m in a hurry and impatient about letting my tomatoes cool, I use my blender because it’s glass and not my food processor, which is plastic.

After the roasted tomatoes have cooled, I pour them into freezer containers making sure to leave “head space” at the top of the container. Food expands as it freezes so make sure you leave room for it to do so. It can be very messy when there’s not enough room. Trust me on that. (Just today I found a glass jar of chicken broth that had cracked and leaked chicken broth into my freezer. I was sad about having to clean up but more sad about having to toss out my broken jar filled with homemade broth!)

Here’s an example of what happens as the sauce freezes. 

This is the end of last season’s tomatoes. I roasted everything, regardless of size, shape or color.

Roasted tomatoes in jars before they went into the freezer.

This is a great way to use every last tomato in your garden so there’s no food waste, it’s easy to do, and it tastes great. (I give the green tomato tops to our backyard chickens and then there’s really no waste – those girls love tomato tops!) By skipping the time consuming steps in the kitchen of blanching and removing seeds, it makes roasting tomatoes very easy.

A PDF version of this recipe is available here: How to Roast Tomatoes

What do you do with lots of tomatoes? Roast them? Freeze?

Go Gingham related links:

Homemade pesto – that can be made and frozen
How to roast red peppers or food you’re supposed to burn
Roasted garlic spread that’s another great dip or spread
Spicy, homemade hummus that you make from dried beans
How to stake tomato plants – a very stylishly frugal method!
Why my tomato plants are happy – what I plant with them