no-cook cherry tomato butter
There is a narrow window between Waxing Tomato and Waning Tomato that I call Prime Tomato. It is when every grocery store, restaurant, and Instagram post is suddenly overrun all at once with every size, shape, and color of Tomato Content, all of them living on borrowed time before September hits and they suddenly get sad and deflated overnight and are replaced with mushroom display takeovers.
Yet one of those most tomatocore of all tomato recipes—Marcella Hazan’s tomato and butter sauce—is made with canned. Today, we are going to update that to better reflect the needs of the Prime Tomato period.
Making it is an act of brutal catharsis and requires minimal finesse. You slice cherry tomatoes and forcefully gut them of the seeds and pulp that, if kept, would net you a goopy tomato soup. You blend their hollowed shells once with salt and garlic until it looks like a tomato purée, and then a second time with softened butter. The result is a loose tomato compound butter, meant to be tossed with hot pasta where suddenly, not unlike emulsified cheese or raw egg yolks with bacon fat, it all makes sense.
I used just over half a bag of pasta and ~3/4 cup of the butter; the shape of the day here is Strozapretti.
RECIPE
Inspired by Marcela Hazan’s classic three-ingredient tomato butter sauce, this no-cook recipe is a celebration of raw summer tomatoes at their peak. Melt over pasta and pour the wine.
Effortful time: 20 minutes
Total time: 30 minutes
Makes 1 1/2 cups of butter
YOU NEED
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 stick butter, cut into tbsp cubes, softened (take it out of the fridge 1 hour before)
1 clove garlic, woody end trimmed
Basil, torn or left whole
Pasta, your choice of shape
Parm, always
MAKE IT
Prep your tomatoes for squeezing. Rinse, remove stems, and slice crosswise, so that the stem end is at the North Pole and you are cutting across the equator. You should see neat little seed pockets. Reserve a handful off to the side and ignore them. This is the no-squeeze pile. You’ll toss these with the pasta at the end.
Squeeze the tomatoes. Gently squeeze the other tomato halves over a container and discard the goop. It’s fine if it’s not perfect. You’ll be left with cherry tomato shells.
Take a quick squeeze break to boil some water for pasta.
Blend the tomato butter. In your blending receptacle—a blender, food processor, or a cup you can hit with an immersion blender—add all the shells. Chop your garlic and add that too. Then blend it, probably longer than you think, until it begins to combine. Add the butter, a cube at a time, until the sauce is consistent. Set this aside.
Cook your pasta and prep your basil. I just de-stem and tear it. Simple.
Create your sauce and toss with pasta. Save a bit of pasta water (I didn’t need very much at all), then drain the pasta. Put the hot pasta back in the skillet over the lowest possible heat, then scoop over 2/3 cup of the tomato blend plus a bare minimum splash of pasta water. The butter will melt while the tomatoes coat the pasta, creating a glossy sauce–magic! Stir in your basil and remaining raw tomatoes, and fold to fully combine.
Serve it up. Scoop into bowls; shower with parm and freshly cracked black pepper.