Drying up
It was an amazing year in the garden. As usual, I had grown my tomatoes from seed, and this year, my seed success rate was beyond average, which meant I had to find homes for more plants—either out in the world or in one of my many garden spaces. We had a fair amount of rain this spring (tomatoes love to drink) and then lots of high heat days (tomatoes love the heat). I planted about 25 plants (give or take) in 15+ varieties, from Pineapple to Black Krim and Sungold to Rosella. Most of my seeds come from Baker’s Creek. I put my tomatoes out very early (March), using Wall O Waters for insulation. These are just awesome, by the way—might make my top five favorite garden tool. Everything was a bit slow to ripen this year, but once it got going, it was unstoppable. An endless supply of gorgeous, multicolored, perfectly ripe tomatoes flowed into our kitchen, and eventually I couldn’t keep up, no matter how much bruschetta, burata salad, horiatiki, and fresh tomato lasagna I made. We pivoted to making sauce to freeze, and that helped for a while, but eventually, I needed another tomato outlet, and I bought myself a dehydrator.
My first experiment was with cherry tomatoes, which I sliced in half and doused with fresh ground garlic and hand-dried oregano. As usual, I consulted a bunch of recipes and then combined what made sense to my tastebuds. Some suggested the addition of olive oil, so I tried this on half of my tomatoes, with no discernible difference in results, so I would recommend skipping the oil. I popped these in to the dehydrator cut side up and set it at 135° Fahrenheit for about 6 hours. at the 6 hour mark, I flipped the tomatoes over, checking dryness as I went. I was looking for stiff, unsticky tomatoes—those would be my signs of readiness. Nothing was close to ready yet, so I set the dehydrator for another 6 hours and came back to check when that time had elapsed.
At that point, many were done, and some needed more time. I ran the dehydrator once or twice for two hours to get all of the tomatoes to the finish line.
Some recipes recommend a more “leathery” texture, while others push for fully dried. The right “doneness'“ depends a lot on how you plan to store and use the tomatoes. If you want shelf-stable tomatoes, go for fully dry (stiff, crisp, unsticky). Likewise, if you hope to make tomato powder (ground up dried tomatoes that you can sprinkle on anything for a super tomatoey flavor) go for fully dry. If you are open to storing the tomatoes in your fridge, packed in oil, and you are confident you’ll use them quickly, you can aim for a leathery texture instead. The advantage to leathery is that it takes a bit less to rehydrate these tomatoes. I decided to go for fully dry but to freeze the tomatoes just in case I had a few with too much moisture remaining. I’m envisioning popping these dried tomatoes on uninspired frozen pizzas, into salads, or onto pasta. Since my proposed uses will each contribute a fair amount of moisture to the tomatoes, I’m not worried about the tomatoes being “too dry.” I’ll let you know how these work out over the winter months—and share more dehydration adventures soon.