Repertoire

The secret to perfect tomatoes & pasta? Roast the fruit into succulent flavor bombs.

The only way to improve on a salted slice of fresh tomato (other than combining with bacon, lettuce and mayo in the best sandwich of summer) is by roasting. This is such a simple technique that I’m almost embarrassed to share it, since many of you have probably already figured this out for yourselves. But if you have not, I am arming you with a gold medal preparation that makes the most of tomatoes, no matter the season.

Roasting concentrates the flavors of any tomato. It transforms crummy winter grocery store specimens into something palatable, and coaxes ripe summer tomatoes into a better version of themselves, as supercharged sugar bombs. In the gentle heat of a low oven they slump and give up their juices, which mingle with the olive oil and garlic to form a magical elixir.

You can roast any type of tomato, but I particularly like cherry tomatoes, especially Sungolds, a popular golden orange variety that is already plenty sweet to begin with. Regardless of what variety you’re using, the method remains essentially the same: Dump them into a pan, add olive oil and garlic (and herbs, if you’d like) and bake at low heat until they’re juicy, with wrinkled skins. For larger tomatoes, you might halve them before roasting.

With roasted tomatoes in your arsenal, the options are many. They can be added to salads, piled on toast with some fresh ricotta, used as a pizza topping, spooned alongside roasted chicken or grilled steak. You can stir them into risotto. You can use the cooled accumulated juices as the base for a vinaigrette for a green or corn salad. You can eat them straight from the pan in which they were baked. I do all of these things, but my favorite way to use roasted tomatoes is in this very simple pasta dish, which may be one of the best things you make all summer.

The tomatoes and their juices, with the addition of a bit of the starchy pasta cooking liquid, a knob of butter, and some heat, become a vibrantly colored and flavored sauce with enough body to cloak pasta. You have done so little, but you have something so amazing to eat. This is, in my opinion, the very essence of summer cooking.