Cherry tomato confit is the easiest thing you can make that will make you feel like you actually know what you're doing in the kitchen.
Here's the whole recipe: cherry tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, thyme, salt. Low heat. Time. That's it.
You put the tomatoes in a pan — or an oven dish — cover them generously in good olive oil, tuck in a few garlic cloves and some fresh thyme, add a pinch of salt, and let them go at around 120°C for 45 minutes to an hour. No stirring. No checking every five minutes. Just low, slow heat doing its thing.
What happens is this: the tomatoes slowly collapse. Their skins blister and soften. The sugars concentrate. The water evaporates and what's left is this intensely flavored, jammy, almost sweet version of a tomato — nothing like what you started with.
And the oil. The oil is the other product here. It absorbs everything — the tomato juices, the garlic, the herbs — and becomes something you'll want to drizzle on literally everything. Bread, pasta, grilled vegetables, eggs. Everything.
The technique is called confit, which sounds fancy but just means cooking something slowly submerged in fat at a low temperature. It's one of the oldest preservation methods in Mediterranean cooking. People figured this out a long time ago because it works, and it keeps well in the fridge for up to two weeks.
You don't need a recipe. You don't need to measure anything. You just need good olive oil and patience.
Cold-press early harvest olive oil makes a real difference here — the flavor carries through the whole dish. olivereserve.com
