As we know, summer is sungold season. And nowhere is that more obvious than at the Sunday farmer’s market watching throngs of other Aspirational Farmer’s Market People shovel several containers of them at a time into their bags like they’ve just discovered free money on the ground. While not the rarest type of heirloom, they are still only available for a month out of the year, making them one of the more-hyped Limited Edition Drops of tomato season; their relative scarcity seems to make people eager to do something with them while they have the chance, or risk missing their chance entirely.

I too am very attached to these little tomatoes, but for a slightly different reason.

Sungolds get their name for being incredibly sun-resilient relative to other kinds of tomatoes, which means they can grow in more climates that typically can’t sustain tomato life (or any life). One of those climates is Texas, and that is how I introduced my boyfriend to these tomatoes from 3,000 miles away: over the phone in a Dallas Whole Foods, the only heirloom variety we had in common. Visiting his house that weekend, he melted them down as a kind of tomato sauce to go with a grilled cheese he made for me. I always wanted to be someone that someone else wanted to make grilled cheese for, but a sungold grilled cheese was something else.

Once he fell in love with sungolds, I started working them into my imagined depictions of what our life would be like if we one day closed our distance gap. There would be sungold pasta salads eaten cold on hot patio days, scoops of sungold tabbouleh alongside skewers he would grill while I watched from a chair, an original sungold and sausage ragù (a promise I did fulfill) in the dying August light with a glass of chilled wine. One of the last suggestions I made was a sungold pomodoro, a vague reference to a restaurant on the Sorrento coast called Inn Bufalito that served a spectacular buttery tomato sauce over fresh spaghetti with a pile of basil and fresh mozzarella shavings on top. We could linger under string lights and pretend to smell the sea. It didn’t matter that we would not be in Italy.

Soon enough though, it was soup season again, and the narrator switched back to fantasies of deep braises, mushroom funk, candlelit darkness. I have always lived in the future—and always regretting losing the time I had to wish away to get there. Now a whole summer had come and gone and taken the sungolds with it, and we were no closer to where we wanted to be. I was sad, but also angry. Time is the most expensive resource in the world; it is hard to swallow the feeling you wasted it.

Years later, though, we’re finally outside with our chilled wine, eating summer sungold pomodoro we made together on a August Friday Junior. This is an extremely minimal sauce: just one clove of garlic (please trust me), plenty of olive oil, a little butter for silky texture, and a fuck ton of sungold tomatoes, fresh from the market or garden or Whole Foods or wherever you can get your hands on them. After gently sautéing some thin garlic slices, you add the tomatoes and let them break down into a sauce of their own design, simmering for about 30 minutes with the basil stems left after you’ve stripped the leaves. You can then hit it with a stick blender (I did) either partially or fully (I chose the former) to force the olive oil and butter deeper into the tomatoes, silkening it into a bright orange velvet sauce—though there is no requirement to create another dirty dish if you don’t want to. Just toss with hot but not quite cooked pasta, a splash of pasta water, and simmer until al dente; scatter with torn or ribboned basil and grate over whatever salty cheese most appeals. Here I mimicked the sorcery of Sorrento mozzarella, which I find impossible to grate, and used ricotta salata, a dried version of ricotta that’s somewhere between a mozzarella and parm. It is a dish that understands leisure, taking turns with prep and allowing room for lots of talking in between. There was a reason it always sounded like a romantic idea in my imaginary life.

Though we now spend every day together, sometimes my boyfriend will tell me that he gets sad going to bed at night because it means we have one day less together on earth. He says that even though the future excites him, he’s not ready to let that time go in exchange. I get sad about it too, but what else can we do? Try with all our power to squeeze the most juice out of it, which is not meant to be a tomato pun. Maybe just linger in the season that’s leaving before opening the door to the one that knocks. Forgive ourselves for staying up too late and drinking too much wine. And soak up all these summer sungolds until the bitter end.

RECIPE

A silky-smooth pomodoro designed to seize the last day of summer’s best sungold tomatoes.

Effortful time: 10 minutes

Total time: 50 minutes

you need

2 pints sungold tomatoes
1 clove of garlic, sliced
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp butter
A small handful of basil; leaves and stems separated
Kosher salt, to taste
8 oz pasta; I like a long shape (this is fusili bucati)
Some kind of nice grating cheese; ricotta salata is fun, or feel free to use parm reg

Make it

Get prepped. Remove any tomato stems from your cherry tomatoes and give them a good rinse. Slice the garlic; if you’re blending, you can also just give it a rough chop. Tear basil leaves off the stems and either ribbon the basil (I lay a few leaves flat and roll lengthwise, parallel to the stem and then slice down the line) or just tear them up.
Heat 3 tbsp olive oil in a medium-sized saucepan or Dutch oven (3 quarts or so) over medium-heat. Sauté the garlic about 30 seconds until fragrant.
Create the sauce. Toss in all your cherry tomatoes, the basil stems, salt (I used maybe 1/2 tsp.), and 1 tbsp butter. Gently combine and lower the heat to low. Partially cover and simmer about 35-40 minutes, until all the cherry tomatoes have burst and have released a lot of liquid. Remove the basil stems.
Cook pasta. After about 30 minutes, set some salty water to boil. Shoot for 2 minutes under al dente.
Optional: blend the sauce. While the pasta cooks, use a stick blender to puree the sauce right in the pan to whatever consistency you like. You can also transfer the tomatoes into a blender, or move them into another vessel for blending if your pan is wide (you won’t be able to immerse the blades on a stick blender if this is the case). I like to blend about 75% of the way, so there are still some tomato-textured bits but the sauce is otherwise silky. If you moved it out of the pan to blend, put it back.
Combine pasta with sauce. Use tongs to move the still-crunchy pasta straight over into the pan with the sauce. Add pasta water and simmer on low until fully al dente. Toss in torn basil, shower with a bit of your favorite salty cheese; take your bowls outside if you can, along with more cheese.