Capture the sun

IN the middle of a transcendent BLT, I felt the sadness coming on. It happens every year, around the end of summer. How, I worry, can I possibly make it through another winter bereft of the pleasures of the season's perfect tomatoes? We are blessed with superior vegetables year-round in California, but no one has yet figured out how to produce a winter tomato that is more than an unpleasant reminder of sunnier days.

But California farmers have outdone themselves this year: Tomatoes have been more succulent and plentiful than ever. So I armed myself with 20 pounds of my favorite, dry-farmed Early Girls from Dirty Girl Produce, an organic farm in Santa Cruz, and started working on how to preserve their intense, sweet essence through the dark winter ahead.

I had learned from the late Patience Gray's "Honey From a Weed" of Puglian salsa secca, fresh tomatoes pureed, strained and left out to concentrate in the ardent Mediterranean sun. Every day, the volume is reduced by half, until after three or four days you have a stiff, glossy brick-red paste that tastes of nothing but tomatoes and the sun. Tomato paste, in other words, but without that tinny taste, or anything else to interfere with its pure tomato flavor.

This sounded perfect: less work than canning my own sauce, and the nature of the paste meant I wasn't limited to plum tomatoes like Romas, which tend to be lacking in the flavor department. I chose Early Girls, but you can use whatever tomato you love best.

Just make sure your love is based on flavor, and not on the transitory pleasures of fancy colors and labels. And if you buy in bulk, your farmer will probably give you a discount.

But how to replicate the slow inferno of a Puglian summer in my gas oven? Paul Bertolli, former chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Oliveto in Oakland, had the answer, which he calls conserva, in his superb book, "Cooking by Hand." Six hours or so in a slow oven transforms 20 pounds (you can make as much as you want in increments of 5 pounds) of fresh tomatoes into four to five pints of a miraculous substance that's both more intense and more useful than canned tomato sauce, and dramatically sweeter and more tomato-y than canned paste. It's a secret ingredient you can add to virtually any winter dish to faithfully recall the glories of summer, and give new depth of flavor to your cooking.