Roast Cherries and Tomatoes with Ricotta-Yogurt Cream and Lime Zest

A sweet-savory-tangy-spicy dip topped with chile and fresh herbs

’Tis the season for stone fruit, tomatoes, and creamy cheeses. Everywhere I look, everyone is posting recipes full of all the best summer fruit, almost always accompanied by something creamy and cold. The Department of Salads has a gorgeous Stone Fruit, Mozzarella, and a Little Green Salad, Real Simple Food has a Labneh Cheesecake with Cardamom and Syrupy Saffron Apricots, Alexis deBoschnek has a Crispy Gnocchi Caprese. I got into the spirit a few weeks ago with my Peach Caprese Toast with Pesto and Honey.

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My new book, SNACKING DINNERS, launched in April! Check out my events page for upcoming talks, signings, and pop-ups in the Bay Area, New York, and more!

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This time around, I’m taking inspiration from a dish I had at Comptoir de Vie in Paris, where my husband and I had a beautiful no-waste meal (with no-ice cocktail pairings) to celebrate our anniversary. One of my favorite courses was a gazpacho of tomatoes and cherries—a magical pairing I hadn’t really thought about before. When I got back to California, I started experimenting with different ways of putting these ingredients together, but I immediately came up against an unexpected problem: it’s not good tomato season in the Bay Area yet.

At first, this felt like a real problem, but soon it occurred to me that a recipe dependent on having perfect, flavorful cherries and perfect, flavorful tomatoes available at exactly the same time would actually be unmakeable for a lot of cooks. After all, we don’t all live in places where these seasons coincide—or even in places where there’s reasonable access to the really flavorful version of each of these ingredients. So I decided to make a dish that enhances and concentrates the flavors of both of these fruits by roasting them. That way, it works well even if the ingredients haven’t reached their perfect level of ripeness.

To go with the roasted fruit, I obviously needed something creamy. For this recipe, I opted for the milkiness of whole milk ricotta and mixed in some Greek yogurt for a silkier texture and a bit of tanginess. After I spooned the roasted fruit onto the creamy base, I topped the whole thing with a generous amount of lime zest, a good dusting of a mild chili powder, and a bunch of chopped mint and cilantro. The result was sweet, savory, tangy, aromatic and a little bit spicy.

To eat this dip-like extravaganza, I sliced up some baguette (because after our trip, we’ve been keeping a lot of baguette in the house). I played with piling everything onto thick slices, but the bread took over the flavors. Thin slices for scooping did a better job of letting the nuanced flavors of the dish shine on their own. The amounts below will feed two as a snacking dinner or a few people as part of a cocktail hour.

Roast Cherries and Tomatoes with Ricotta-Yogurt Cream and Lime Zest

2–3 big handfuls cherries
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
Extra virgin olive oil
12 ounces whole milk ricotta
¾ cup whole Greek yogurt
1 lime for zesting
Ground chile, such as Aleppo pepper
Fresh mint and cilantro leaves
Baguette

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Pit the cherries and cut each one in half. Cut the tomatoes in half or, if they’re very big, into quarters.

2. Combine all the fruit in a medium roasting dish and season well with salt and pepper, then add enough olive oil that everything is well covered and there’s a nice film of oil on the bottom of the tray. Roast the fruit until it shrivels a little and some parts start to brown, 30–40 minutes. (As the fruit roasts, the juices will join the oil in the bottom of the pan, so that in the end, they’re poaching in their own liquids.) Set everything aside to cool.

3. While the cherries and tomatoes are cooling, combine the ricotta and yogurt in a medium bowl, season them well with a couple big pinches of salt (use two or three fingers along with your thumb, rather than just your thumb and forefinger) and a few grinds of pepper. Mix everything well, then taste and adjust the seasoning.

4. Chiffonade the mint leaves and roughly chop the cilantro. Cut the baguette into very thin slices (about ¼-inch thick).

5. When the tomato and cherry mixture has cooled a bit (it can be warm or room temperature), spoon the ricotta mixture into a low-sided bowl, creating a well in the center, and fill it with the roasted tomatoes and cherries, along with some of their cooking liquid. Grate a very generous amount of lime zest onto everything, dust it with some of the chile pepper, and scatter the herbs on top.

   Bonus Post—A Fun Cooking Video:

   Earlier this week, I made a quick video about some of my favorite ways to cut up avocados—specifically, the two methods that appear in my cookbook in the recipes for the Deconstructed Guacamole and the Unstuffed Crab Salad. Click on the link below (or here) for the full video.

   Photos: Georgia Freedman