I'll be honest with you, my main mode of eating cherry and grape tomatoes is "one at a time, out of hand." Cherry tomatoes are one of the few reliable garden products in my area, and every late summer I get boxes of them from friends, family members, and neighbors. And I eat them all.
I always think, "I should at least slice these and add salt and pepper." Then I keep eating them.
A cherry tomato basically packs all of the sweetness and flavor of a regular sized tomato into one tiny package. Each one is like a super tomato. And their skins tend to be a bit thinner, too, which only makes them easier to eat. Cherry tomatoes are also more forgiving of growing conditions, ripen earlier, and are more likely to produce tomatoes even in a lousy year, which makes them a favorite of gardeners.
Cherry tomatoes are traditionally added to salad, which does them a disservice. If added whole, they get slick with the dressing and slide around and evade your fork in a frustrating manner guaranteed to slop other bits of the salad out onto the table. If sliced, they leak their juice all over everything and turn your salad into a sloppy mess.
A better use is to slice them in half and put them in a caprese salad (i.e. tossed with fresh basil, olive oil, mozzarella cheese, salt, and pepper). This really lets you taste the flavor of the cherry tomatoes too, instead of drowning them in the rest of your salad.
Cherry tomatoes don't do as well in cooking. Somehow their flavor and deliciousness seems to get lost if you cook them up into pasta sauce. I tried it once, and it made me sad. Saveur has some great ideas for cherry tomato recipes, but if you ask me, when it comes to preparing these little beauties, less is more.
Image courtesy Flickr/Indiana Public Media
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