Preserving Cherry Tomatoes as Tomato Confit

Reader Contribution by Andrea Chesman
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Cherry tomatoes provide a special challenge for gardeners who plan to preserve as much as the tomato harvest as possible.  Great for snacking and throwing into salads, cherry tomatoes have too many seeds and proportionately too much skin to make great canned sauces. On the other hand, cherry tomatoes are super abundant.

It’s hard to resist planting more than one cherry tomato plant.  They tend to ripen earlier than other larger, meatier varieties (which is especially important to Northern growers with a short growing season like myself).  So, of course, I plant Sun Golds and Super Sweet 100s.  I’m also partial to Golden Sweets, a yellow grape tomato.  Even though I plant only one plant of each variety, I can get swamped by the harvest.

It’s a wonderful thing to have a bowl of cherry tomatoes on the kitchen counter where family members can pop one or two in their mouths as they walk by or stop for a chat. Inevitably though, a tomato with a cracked skin slips in, and the next thing I know, there are fruit flies hovering over the bowl and evidence of rotting tomatoes. 

Before that can happen, I roast small batches of cherry tomatoes to make tomato confit (confit is French for preserves). I’d call it tomato jam, but making jam involves more work and this is super easy. Although these tomato preserves must be refrigerated (they don’t take well to canning or freezing for long-term storage), making confit does extend the tomatoes’ shelf life and is so delicious and versatile that it gets eaten as fast as it is made.

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