Dried Red Tomatoes

Dateline: 3 September 2013

I'm drying tomatoes. I like to dry tomatoes because it's so doggone easy to do, and they're so good.

If you go on YouTube and check out the videos about dehydrating tomatoes, you'll find people who parboil and peel the skins off tomatoes before drying them. And there are people who remove all the seeds before drying them. That's too much work! 

I just wash, slice and dry. The tomatoes above are some of the Tommy Toe tomatoes I grew on a string trellis, as explained at This Web Site. The Tommy Toes are the size of a ping pong ball, and they grow in copious clusters. I sliced them into quarters and cut away the little bit of toughness at the base of each stem.

They dry for 10 hours, or so, at 130 to 140 degrees before they're sufficiently hardened. Then they go into canning jars with a tight lid.

The dried tomatoes can go into winter soups, but mostly we will consume them just as they are, right out of the jar, like a snack, in the winter months. 

I eat them like a lozenge,  letting them soften and dissolve in my mouth before chewing and swallowing the pulp. They're full of nutrition, especially if you leave the skin and seeds on them.