Smoked tomatoes

Preheat the smoker to 200°F/90°C. Scatter the rosemary sprigs in a baking dish. 

Slice the tomatoes into four slices each, and then arrange in the baking dish in a single layer, or with a slight overlap. Sprinkle the olive oil, black pepper, salt, and dried basil on top. 

Place in the smoker, and leave to cook for around 1 hour, or until at your preferred tenderness. Remove from the smoker and enjoy as a side accompaniment, or leave to cool to blend into a sauce.

Tips & tricks

There are a variety of ways to smoke food, and different bases from charcoal to wood chips will add nuanced flavors to your tomatoes. For example, smoking with cherrywood will infuse a mild, sweet flavor whereas charcoal will add an earthy, smoky taste. If you don’t have a smoker at home, you can use your oven instead. Following the recipe above, simply heat your oven to the same temperature and use liquid smoke in the dish. Made from water that’s been infused with wood smoke, you can add liquid smoke to the baking dish ahead of putting it into the oven to impart those signature smoky flavors. You should be able to source a bottle of liquid smoke as needed easily enough online. 

It’s important to choose the right tomatoes for the task. Whilst it may be tempting to create smoked cherry tomatoes, they’re too small to be smoked for the required amount of time. Instead, we’d recommend using heirloom or beefsteak tomatoes. These bigger varieties are suited to more time in the smoker. As in our recipe above, we’d recommend chopping these varieties of tomatoes into thick slices, as these work best for serving straight from the smoker as a side accompaniment. 

Some chefs will include cloves of garlic in this dish for additional flavor. This is definitely optional, but works especially well if you intend to make a sauce out of the tomatoes, as it adds a little more depth to the final flavor. 

We’ve included the option above to confit the tomatoes. The word “confit” is derived from the French word “confire” which means preserve. It’s the process of cooking an ingredient in its own fat, in the case of meat, or in a fat like olive oil. If you choose to include this step, you’ll end up with slightly plumper, fresher tomatoes at the end, but both methods will produce extremely delicious flavors.

How to use them

Smoked tomatoes can be enjoyed straight from the smoker, on top of a tasty, classic salad, or straight onto a slice of garlic bread. You can also use the smoked tomatoes as the base for a soup or a sauce. For a sauce, we’d recommend removing the skins first and then using a blender to create a classic base for a pasta dish or barbeque marinade. You could also let the tomatoes cool down if you’d prefer to add cold smoked tomatoes to a fresh salad dish.