What To Do With Tomatoes 2024 (19 Recipes & Tips)
Fragrant, sweet, juicy tomatoes bursting with flavor are the best! What to do with tomatoes? We have lots of great recipe ideas and tomato tips.
Check out our favorite ways to use tomatoes in appetizers, sauces, salads, pastas, pizzas and main dishes.
Tomatoes are one of our favorite things about summer. We’re focusing on fresh tomato recipes, but we also included a couple of popular recipes that make good use of quality canned tomatoes.
Don’t let the end of summer go by without trying a few of these delicious and easy tomato recipes.
Appetizers with tomatoes
Easy Gazpacho Recipe (smooth or chunky)
Caprese Appetizers (on mini skewers)
Tomato Tart with Puff Pastry
Main dishes with fresh tomatoes
Easy Eggplant Parmesan (30 minutes)
Fresh Tomato Basil Pasta With Lemon and Olives
Vegetable Spaghetti Squash Recipe (Mexican-style)
Baked Cod Recipe with Cherry Tomato Sauce
Baked Halibut Recipe with Tomatoes and Capers
Creamy Parmesan Polenta with Tomato Salad
Panzanella Toscana with Grilled Chicken (35 Minutes)
How To Grill Pizza
Tomato sides and salads
Pesto Orzo With Vegetables (20 Minutes)
Tomato and Onion Salad (Easy 15 Minute Prep)
Fire Roasted Tomatoes (Grilled or Roasted)
Corn and Tomato Salad
Cherry Tomato Sauce (spicy Moroccan-style)
Best canned tomato recipes
These recipes use good canned tomatoes like San Marzano.
Simple San Marzano Tomato Sauce
Easy Tomato Soup with Canned Tomatoes
Ratatouille Soup With Cheese Toast
Tomato varieties and how to use them
There are endless varieties of tomatoes – in fact 300 varieties grown in Ontario Canada alone. Here are a few of the popular varieties that are widely available in your local farmers market or grocery store.
Beefsteak or Field Tomatoes: Mild flavor. Great for salads, salsas, BLTs, chicken burgers or veggie burgers. Not great for cooking in sauces as they have excess water content and take a long time to boil down.
Plum or Roma Tomatoes: Great for sauces like our San Marzano sauce as they are pulpier, have fewer seeds and boil down quickly.
Heirloom Tomatoes (my fave): Great texture and flavor. Use in salads, sandwiches and non sauce dishes.
Cherry Tomatoes: Great for snacks and salads and appetizers. Sweet and thin skinned. Sweet cherry tomatoes come in many different colors and can also be used in sauces as they cook down pretty quickly. We have 7 recipes on what to do with cherry tomatoes!
How to choose the best tomatoes
- Color, ideally, should be deep red when ripe (place on the counter to ripen if not fully ripe). Choose tomatoes that are free of blemishes and bruises.
- Look for vine-ripened tomatoes to avoid being fooled by artificially ripened ones that are often bland and tasteless.
- Smell the stem of the tomato. It should smell fragrant and earthy.
Best ways to store tomatoes
Most of these tips come from Harold McGee, a food science expert in a post by Epicurious on how to store tomatoes the right way.
Not yet ripe: If your tomatoes are not quite ripe, leave them on the counter for a few days. Lay them in a single layer, stem side down.
Ripe tomatoes: It’s best to use ripe tomatoes right away or store them in a cool place like a cellar at 55F/12.8C. If these options are not possible, Harold says to put them in the fridge but let them come to room temperature before you use them.
Overripe tomatoes: If your tomatoes are overripe, use them to make a sauce.
The bottom line is a fridge is not your tomato’s friend. Keep them out.
Not in season?
Although tomatoes are now grown hydroponically for year round availability, the off season ones are still not up to par with local seasonal tomatoes. For some recipes, it would be best to consider good canned tomatoes instead (which by the way are equally or more nutritious).
Hope you found a recipe or two you like for what to do with tomatoes. When they are ripe and fragrant, they are a wonderful star of the dish in sauces, salads, appetizers, gazpacho and more.
And don’t count out canned tomatoes – just as nutritious and picked at their peak.
