Roasted Tomato and Balsamic Vinegar Sauce
I know for a fact that this sauce goes great with grilled salmon or with a potato and cheese omelette. Chilled, it’s an excellent salad dressing. I’m planning on using it with pasta and roasted zucchini for a light, summery entree; it would likely also be good as something to dunk a grilled cheese sandwich into. Quite frankly, it would probably go well with just about anything you’d eat a tomato with.
I pureed this sauce with my immersion blender, but if you don’t have one, a regular blender would do just fine. In fact, it would probably yield a smoother sauce with fewer visible chunks of basil.
Roasted Tomato and Balsamic Vinegar Sauce
Yield: about a cup and a half
- 4-6 assorted heirloom tomatoes, depending on size
- olive oil
- about 12 leaves fresh basil
- about 2 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
- salt and pepper to taste
Core the tomatoes and toss them with enough olive oil to coat them evenly. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper and roast them at 400 F on a baking sheet with a rim for half an hour or at 350 F for 45 minutes. Unless you’re baking something else in your regular oven, it’s easiest to use a toaster oven for this step if you have one. The volume of tomatoes being roasted is so small that there’s no sense heating up your whole kitchen with your regular oven if you don’t have to.
When the tomatoes are done roasting, blend them with the oil they roasted in, the basil, and the balsamic vinegar. Drizzle olive oil in slowly while the blender is still going until the sauce thickens up into a nice emulsion. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasonings as necessary.
October 20th, 2006 at 9:33 am
[...] Another example of a more complex vinaigrette is my roasted tomato and balsamic vinegar sauce, which I opted not to label as a vinaigrette because it’s so much more versatile than just being a salad dressing; although that’s the case with many such sauces; the raspberry dressing described above would go quite nicely with roast duck, I believe; and the egg-yolk dressing is a nice bacteria-free alternative to hollandaise. [...]