Vegan Puttanesca Confit
The ingredients before cooking.
Puttanesca, the Italian pasta dish, has everything I love in it. Olives. Capers. Garlic. Chili. And then…anchovies.
Before I became a vegetarian, I loved fish and seafood. I didn’t care much about any other kind of meat and actively hated pork and beef, but I really enjoyed fish. I don’t miss it now, but there are lots of dishes that contain fish ingredients that are otherwise exactly the kind of thing I love to eat. I mean, I used to live in Thailand, and the struggle was real sometimes to get decent Thai food without fish sauce in it.
After cooking.
I think a big part of why I liked seafood so much is just that I love salty, briny flavors. So, it’s no surprise that I am a HUGE fan of everything pickled and preserved. Here in Casablanca, my favorite place is the olive market over in the Habous neighborhood. Not only do they have a wide variety of olives, but also a selection of various pickled things, including capers, garlic, chilis, and lemons. In addition to sampling different kinds of olives, I love incorporating these ingredients into my cooking.
Even though I don’t eat fish anymore, the remaining components of puttanesca are still wildly flavorful and taste amazing together. They’re also things I tend to get at the olive market. I frequently make confit (ingredients slow-cooked in oil) to mix into lentil salads, eat with bread, or as a pasta-topper. So, what if I combined the two and made a puttanesca-inspired confit with my olive market findings?
A small batch is perfect for two people.
The first result of my experiment was gone within 24 hours. Granted, I only made a small batch, since I’m cooking for two. We had a baguette from one of the wonderful French bakeries nearby and ate it with that that evening, and then the next day when we ordered pizza, used it as a dip. I plan to some day use it to mix with lentils for a healthy work lunch, but so far I can’t stop immediately eating it with bread!
If you do have leftovers you need to store, keep it in an air-tight container in the fridge and use within a week. This really isn’t a true confit, which is actually a preservation technique and uses a lot more oil. As such, I don’t recommend storing it for too long. Garlic is one of those low-acid vegetables that is at a higher risk of developing botulism, which I’m really paranoid about, so I like to play it safe and use the confit within a week.
Ready to eat!
A note about the ingredients:
Chili: I used pickled chilis from the market, but you could easily use dried or fresh chilis instead. I like things spicier, but if you want to tone down the heat you can use fewer chilis. They’re really there to impart flavor and a little heat, so I didn’t actually eat them.
Garlic: Even though I have pickled garlic from the market, using fresh garlic cloves is a MUST as it will impart a much stronger flavor. You can crush the cloves and cut any big ones in half before you add them, but there’s no need to chop them up, as they will get very soft in the oil.
Olives: I also specifically bought pitted olives from the market for cooking, as it saves a lot of time, and the pitted olives they have are pretty much all green ones. You can try using any olive you like, though I don’t recommend those canned black olives, as they don’t have enough of the briny olive flavor.
Salt: Even though the recipe contains some salty ingredients, I do think it benefits from adding a little additional salt.
I like it on bread with goat cheese. You can use a vegan alternative spread!
Recipe:
Vegan Puttanesca Confit
Ingredients
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 250°F.
- Assemble the tomatoes, capers, olives, garlic, and chilis in an oven-safe dish. While they shouldn’t be piled up in there, they should be crowded. If your tomatoes are rolling around like billiard balls in an earthquake, your dish is too big! Use a smaller one…or you can just double the recipe to fit. ;)
- Drizzle with a generous amount of olive oil, so the tomatoes are about halfway submerged. Sprinkle with salt.
- Cook in the oven for approximately 90 minutes, or until tomatoes are withered and beginning to burst. My oven isn’t particularly powerful, so I recommend you check after an hour and see how they’re doing.
- Remove from the oven when finished. Let cool to a tolerable temperature before enjoying. Store leftovers in an air-tight container in the fridge.
You will have two parts of this confit to enjoy: the soft and spreadable tomatoes and garlic, and the flavor-infused oil.
Recommendations:
Spread on a baguette
Use as a sandwich spread
Mix with pasta
Mix into a lentil salad
Use the oil for cooking or salad dressing
Combine the oil with balsamic vinegar and dunk some bread in there
