Baked Zucchini with Tomato Sauce

Vegetables and sauce

1. It’s ideal when baked zucchini are made from young vegetables you can pick in the garden. Young zucchini, before their seeds have formed, are the most tender and tasty, and you don’t even have to peel them before cooking. If you can, take several zucchini and courgettes of different colors, and the dish will look more festive. Besides, dark-green zucchini, which we call courgettes, contain a lot of vitamin C, and that is good for you.

   

2. First, make the sauce. Put large ripe tomatoes in a bowl and pour boiling water over them for 1-2 mins. Then cool them in cold water and peel off the outer skin, which looks like a film. Remove the seeds and the white parts inside the tomatoes. Put the pieces in a blender, add peeled garlic cloves and one hot pepper pod, with the seeds and white inner membranes removed.

   

3. Bake the sweet bell pepper until soft and, while still hot, put it in a plastic bag. When the pepper has cooled, peel off the outer skin and remove the seeds. Finely chop the flesh of the baked pepper with a knife.

4. Peel and finely chop the onion. Also fully clean the second hot pepper pod and chop it with a knife. Heat olive oil in a frying pan and fry the onion and hot pepper in it until soft. Don’t overcook them. It’s enough for the onion to become soft and barely start to turn golden.

   

   Add the chopped bell pepper flesh, then salt and pepper to taste. Add 1-2 pinches of dried herbs typical of the Mediterranean region: savory, oregano, basil and so on. Such dried mixes are sold everywhere now and are of good quality.

   

5. Blend the tomato flesh, garlic and pepper in a blender to a purée. If you like, add 0.5 tsp of sugar (2 g) and a few drops of balsamic vinegar to make the sauce sweet and sour. Add all the tomato to the pan with the onion and pepper.

   

   Bring the sauce to a boil. Turn the heat under the pan down to the minimum. Cover the pan with a lid and simmer the sauce for 10 mins. Season with a little more salt and pepper to taste. The sauce should be as thick as homemade zucchini caviar.

   

Baking

1. Wash the zucchini and courgettes and cut off the ends. Slice the vegetables crosswise into rounds 5-6 mm thick. If the zucchini and courgettes aren’t the same diameter, it’s worth sorting the rounds by size. Salt the zucchini, but only very lightly.

   

3. To make tasty zucchini you will need a baking dish. You can use a ceramic dish of a suitable size, or one made of heatproof glass. Disposable aluminum trays with lids are also sold. They are used for freezing food or for baking. Their main advantage is that you don’t have to wash them, you just throw them away. Pour a third of the hot sauce of tomatoes, garlic and hot pepper onto the bottom of the baking dish. Spread the sauce evenly over the bottom. There is no need to grease the dish first. By the way, a disposable aluminum dish is quite thin and delicate, so handle it carefully or it will crumple or tear. Besides, it gets very hot when heated, so it’s better not to put it into the oven and take it out with your hands, but to slide it onto a cutting board with an oven mitt.

   

4. Lay the zucchini on top of the tomato sauce. If you’re making the dish with multicolored zucchini and courgettes, alternate them by color so the dish looks varied. The dish should be filled completely with zucchini, in several rows. If you end up with leftover zucchini, I recommend making pasta with vegetables from them the next day, a tasty and healthy breakfast.

   

   Pour all the remaining sauce over the zucchini prepared for baking. It’s important that the sauce gets between the rows of zucchini and only a little tomato is left on the surface. Since the zucchini are packed tightly together, it’s worth separating the layered rounds slightly with a knife so that at least a little sauce gets between them.

   

5. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees and let it heat up well. The volume of zucchini is quite large, so the time it takes for the zucchini and sauce to heat through can be considerable. To shorten it, you can cover the zucchini with a piece of food foil at the start and remove it once the sauce begins to boil. After removing the foil, lower the oven temperature to 200 degrees. If you can use the top grill of your oven, you can do without foil. Cook the baked vegetables for about 25-30 mins from the moment the tomato sauce starts to boil. During this time the zucchini become soft and begin to brown. Some of the liquid from the zucchini mixes with the tomato sauce.

   

   It’s impossible to give the exact cooking time. But if about half an hour has passed and the zucchini have become soft, and the surface of the vegetables has started to brown, they are completely ready.

Serving

1. Transfer the finished vegetables to a large plate. How you arrange them for serving is up to you, but I advise laying the zucchini around the edge of the plate and leaving the middle free. Spoon the sauce in which the zucchini were baked into the middle of the plate, into the hollow formed by the zucchini.

   

   Garnish the baked zucchini with sprigs of greens and olives, and pepper to taste with coarsely ground red hot pepper.

2. Serve the baked zucchini with the sauce only hot, adding nothing but fresh bread.

   

   Baked zucchini can be a vegetable dish on their own or a side dish. I’ll note that you don’t have to bake the zucchini all the way through, but can leave them al dente. That is even tastier, by the way, and fashionable in all sorts of diets.