What To Do With a Billion Spoon Tomatoes
Last year, we grew approximately one billion spoon tomatoes. How many eensy tomatoes can one household realistically put on a salad each night? We tried, we really did. But we needed some more options. (I swear this isn’t a tomato blog, but there’s a lot going on with tomatoes in the summer, you know?)
What Are Spoon Tomatoes?
Imagine a cherry tomato, then make it tiny. So little, so bitty. Each one is about the size of a pea, and they got the name spoon tomatoes because roughly a dozen of them fit on a single spoon. They pack a surprising amount of flavor into that tiny size, with slightly thicker skin than a regular cherry tomato. They’re also called currant tomatoes.
They’re also incredibly easy to grow from seed, which is exactly how we ended up with more spoon tomatoes than we knew what to do with.
Once the plant really got going, we quickly realized we had no plan for what to do with so many spoon tomatoes. Thank goodness for the internet, because it turns out there are plenty of ways to use them up.
Make a Spoon Tomato Sauce or Spread
I used quite a few spoon tomatoes in my regular pasta sauce recipes, and just as often threw them in raw toward the end of cooking a pasta dish. One thing worth knowing if you make a sauce with them is that spoon tomatoes are too tiny to peel and their skins are just a bit too thick to fully disappear into the sauce. It’s not a dealbreaker, just something to expect texture-wise.
I also tried and enjoyed these recipes:
Fast and Easy Pasta With Blistered Cherry Tomato Sauce from Serious Eats
Tomato Confit from The Uncommon Dish
5-Ingredient Burst Tomato Spread from Gimme Some Oven
Small Batch Cherry Tomato Jam from The Delicious Spoon
Make Sun-Dried Tomatoes
The easiest way to sun-dry spoon tomatoes is to lay them out in direct sun on a piece of parchment, or on a paper-towel-lined baking dish, then cover them with cheesecloth to keep bugs off. Leave them there until they turn nice and chewy. Because spoon tomatoes have a naturally low moisture content, they dry fairly quickly and end up beautifully concentrated in flavor. They’re SO good this way.
If you don’t want to wait on the sun, you can also use an air fryer or a regular oven. Just keep in mind that these recipes below are written for cherry-sized tomatoes, so you’ll want to adjust your cooking times down a bit for the smaller spoon tomatoes:
Homemade Sun-Dried Tomatoes from The Kitchn
Air Fryer Sun Dried Tomatoes from Fork to Spoon
Freeze Them for Later
After throwing plenty of spoon tomatoes into salads and sauces all summer, I still ended up with more than we could eat fresh, so I froze bagfuls of them.
The process is really simple. Wash and dry the tomatoes, then place them in a freezer-safe bag or container. They aren’t great for eating fresh once they are thawed, since the texture changes quite a bit, but they work well in later-season tomato sauces..
Did We Grow Spoon Tomatoes Again?
We decided not to plant them again this year. Instead we planted a Super Sweet 100s cherry tomato plant in the same spot. (Read how THAT plant is doing here.) As adorable and tasty as spoon tomatoes are, the plant was so wildly prolific last year that we got sick of picking the teeny tiny things one by one.
Don’t worry, our garden isn’t entirely without spoon tomatoes this year. Because there were SO MANY and they’re kind of a pain to pick, plenty ended up dropping to the soil below before we could get to them. Quite a few volunteer seedlings popped up again this spring without any help from us. I’ve pruned it down to just one little plant, we’ll see what it produces hiding under a massive Super Sweet 100s!
If you’re thinking about growing spoon tomatoes yourself, here’s fair warning: you’re signing up for an enormous harvest picking the tiniest, cutest, most delicious fruit. But you might just fall for them anyway, so I hope these recipes help. Bring a wee fairy basket to the garden. You’ll need it.
