Yesterday’s adventure: drying tomatoes. We have quite a crop of tomatoes coming in our garden, but we don’t eat fresh tomatoes, so I’ve had to come up with some fun ways to use them! We love sun dried tomatoes in pasta but they are super expensive. Instead, I looked up how to do it and it seemed fairly easy. I think with the extreme heat we’ve been having, I probably could have actually sun dried them, but instead I used a more exact science, the oven.
First, I blanched them, which was much easier than I was anticipating.
Bring the water to a boil and have an ice bath ready. Submerge them for about 15-20 seconds. It really doesn’t take long. Too long will result in a layer of mush under the skin. You want a tiny layer of mush, that’s what makes them easy to peel, but too much will be messy. After 15-20 seconds, put them in the ice bath until they have cooled completely. This keeps them from continuing to cook (and getting too mushy).
After blanching, the skin just peels off so easily. It’s like magic. These (above) are peeled.
After peeling, I quartered them and scooped out all of the seeds. The seeds are ooey gooey and contain lots of water. Since drying is essentially removing the water, you want to start without extra water. I placed them on a rack (and some on a rack on a broiling pan) because it helps circulate the air more than sitting on a cookie sheet.
Because I have one, I used my convection oven. Conventional ovens have hot spots the closer you get to the burner. Convection ovens, unlike conventional ovens, circulate air and keep the temperature even throughout the entire oven. Circulating air also helps the drying process. The instructions I found said you can use either, just put them on the lowest temperature (like 200 degrees) and let them cook for hours… like 10 hours. After 1 hour and 30 minutes at 225 degrees I had this:
I guess it worked a little too well. You can see that some of them on this pan dried out so much that they actually burned. Sad day. It’s ok, though because most of the other pan was fine. I really only lost about 4 tomatoes out of 12. I also harvested another 12 that morning and learned from this experience to dry 9 of those ones successfully (the other three wouldn’t fit). That time, I turned them to the absolute lowest heat setting and only cooked them in 20 minute increments. I ended up with about a cup, or what you would get in a jar of them at the store, all for free!