Cherry tomatoes roasted low and slow until jammy, then crushed into a glossy sauce for gluten-free spaghetti. Almost no work, huge flavour.
Prep
10 mins
Cook
1h 10m
Servings
4
Per serving
£1.15
Difficulty
easy
This is the recipe I fall back on when the tomatoes in the fridge are past their best. An hour in a low oven turns them sweet and concentrated, and the garlic goes soft enough to squash into the pan with a fork. No blender, no passata, no fuss.
Heat the oven to 150C fan. Tip the halved cherry tomatoes into a large roasting tin, cut side up, and tuck the unpeeled garlic cloves in among them.
Pour over 3 tablespoons of the oil, scatter with the oregano, sugar, salt and pepper, and roast for 1 hour. Do not stir. The tomatoes should collapse and brown at the edges, and a syrupy pool should form in the base of the tin.
If your tomatoes are very watery, give them another 10 minutes rather than reaching for tomato puree. Patience does the work here.
When the tomatoes have about 12 minutes left, bring a large pan of well-salted water to a rolling boil and cook the gluten-free spaghetti to the packet time, minus one minute. Before draining, scoop out a mugful of the cooking water.
Squeeze the roasted garlic out of the skins into the roasting tin and mash it into the tomatoes with a fork, scraping up the caramelised bits stuck to the tin.
Drain the pasta and tip it straight into the roasting tin with the last tablespoon of oil, the chilli flakes if using, and a splash of the reserved water. Toss hard for a minute so the sauce clings.
Gluten-free pasta drinks up sauce as it sits, so keep the reserved water beside you and loosen it right before serving.
Fold through most of the basil, taste for salt, and serve with the rest of the basil on top.