How To Make Flavorless Store-Bought Tomatoes Stand Out, According To Ina Garten

If you've ever bought a massive amount of plum tomatoes on monster sale at the grocery store (some offers are just too good to pass up), you may come home to find that they were on sale for a reason. They're mealy, mild, and frankly, nearly useless.

But kitchen expert Ina Garten has a suggestion to help you out, and it's a pretty easy one. In a Substack newsletter, Garten shared a game-changing tomato cooking method. "You roast them at a high temperature with a little olive oil and good balsamic vinegar," she wrote. "The sugars caramelize, and the tomatoes become incredibly delicious. It's about how to get the most flavor out of simple ingredients." Now that subpar produce has gone from useless to delicious. This method still works without the balsamic vinegar if you don't have any; just expect less sugariness.

The result is these concentrated savory tomato halves, which you can use in a bevy of applications. While Garten doesn't share specific suggestions, I know you could make a smashed tomato pasta sauce, toss them into an herby couscous salad, serve them as a simple side dish alongside reverse-seared steaks, or stuff them into a tomato grilled cheese. They'd fit anywhere that you'd ever need concentrated umami and slightly sweet flavors.

Part of why Ina Garten's suggestion works is because roasting the tomatoes drives off a lot of the water, which concentrates more flavor in the tomato flesh. You can actually help that process along if you lightly salt your sliced tomatoes beforehand and let them rest in a strainer over a bowl for 15 to 30 minutes. You'll find that the tomatoes have let out a good amount of excess liquid — you just made tomato water! That tomato water is actually culinarily useful as a base for a savory cocktail or a salad dressing. You can even add it to a poaching liquid or a pasta sauce for another added layer of flavor.

Then, after patting them dry, you can roast the tomatoes as Garten instructs. Because the tomatoes now have less moisture in them, they'll taste even more intense after their stint in the oven. It's really about coaxing out the flavors that are already in those tomatoes that are otherwise too weak to appreciate in their raw state. That's like getting two ingredients out of one useless one, which is one incredibly resourceful way to turn disappointment into deliciousness.