This Tomato Tart Looks Fancy but Couldn’t Be Easier

August 20, 2025

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Why It Works

Cooking the tomatoes in butter before placing them in the tart reduces their juices, preventing a soggy crust.
Adding a little sugar to the butter forms a caramel that glazes the tomatoes and intensifies their sweetness.

Late summer delivers tomatoes at their most glorious—sun-warmed, bursting with juice, and piled high at the farmers market in colors ranging from golden yellow to purple-black. Cut into one and you get that unmistakable rush of juice, sweet yet tart, the essence of the season captured in a single bite. It’s the kind of bounty that makes you want to celebrate tomatoes in every way possible—layered into sandwiches, tossed into salads, simmered into sauces, and, in this case, transformed into a shimmering upside-down tart.

Calling this recipe a tarte tatin might seem surprising at first. The traditional French tarte tatin is an upside-down apple tart in which fruit is caramelized in butter and sugar before being topped with pastry and baked, then inverted for serving. Here, cherry tomatoes take the starring role: They’re arranged over a mixture of butter and sugar, topped with a round of pastry, and then baked until the pastry is crispy, the butter mixture is caramelized, and the tomatoes are almost impossibly sweet. The tart is then turned out onto a plate to reveal a glossy, jewel-toned crown. As with our French onion soup tarte tatin, the method borrows directly from the original, but the result is more savory rather than sweet, with tomatoes offering the same bright, juicy contrast that apples provide in the dessert version.

This tomato tarte tatin comes to us from my colleague Melissa Gray-Streett in our Birmingham, Alabama, test kitchen, where it quickly became a staff favorite. Her onion and tomato cooking techniques are what make this tart special and what save it from the common pitfall of a soggy crust often associated with tomato tarts. It begins with onions, slowly cooked in butter until they collapse into a tangle of golden sweetness. A splash of dry sherry deglazes the pan, lifting the browned bits and adding a briny note that sharpens the richness. Stock is stirred in and simmered down until it clings to the onions, reducing to a glossy, savory jam that becomes the tart’s backbone.

Then, in an oven-safe skillet, butter, sugar, salt, and pepper are spread across the bottom before a layer of cherry tomatoes is nestled in on top. As the skillet heats, the butter and sugar bubble into caramel around the tomatoes, softening their skins and concentrating their juices until they glisten in a deep amber glaze. The jammy onions are spooned into the spaces between the tomatoes, weaving in sweetness and body. A swipe of mustard across the dough adds a spicy, nose-tingling edge, while nutty, umami-rich Gruyère melts into ribbons, anchoring the tart against all that sweetness and brightness.

Serious Eats / Robby Lozano

By the time the pastry is laid over everything, the filling is already lush and concentrated, far from the watery chaos raw tomatoes would bring. Once baked, the crust emerges crisp, golden, and buttery—sturdy enough to hold the juicy filling yet delicate enough to shatter under your fork. Serve the tart warm, while the crust is crisp and the tomatoes gleam in their caramel. With every slice you get buttery pastry, jammy onions, and juicy, sweet-savory tomatoes—a reminder to savor tomato season to the very last bite.

This recipe was developed by Melissa Gray-Streett; the headnote was written by Laila Ibrahim.