“Sun” Dried Tomatoes
Making my own sun dried tomatoes
These DIY “sun”dried tomatoes were easier than I expected and more delicious!
My “sun” dried tomatoes are made in the oven. Since they take such a long time in the oven, I recommend you fill the oven with as many cookie sheets full of them as possible. My oven has 3 racks, so I do 3 sheets at a time.
I tried both the convection oven and the regular oven as well as a dehydrator. I preferred the convection oven over both the regular oven and the dehydrator but use what you have, they will still be great.
I tried this with both beefsteak and roma tomatoes. The roma tomatoes were substantially better than the beefsteak tomatoes from a cooking perspective and were what I was expecting to like best. The beefsteak tomatoes had an unexpected sweetness and could almost be eaten as dried fruit. I am looking forward to using them for some creative cooking! They are delicious. From a time perspective the beefsteak tomatoes take hours more. When I removed the roma tomatoes from the oven, I put the beefsteak tomatoes in the dehydrator for another 16 hours.
20 Roma Tomatoes per cookie sheet or jelly roll pan
Parchment
Fresh roma tomatoes cut and ready to go in the oven for DIY Sun-dried Tomatoes
Slice the tomatoes longways and place cut-side up on parchment on a cookie sheet. Cook on your oven’s lowest temperature overnight. I removed the stems from the tomatoes but didn’t cut out the stem core. Cooking time at 170 degrees was about 16 hours on the oven setting. About 14 hours on the convection setting.
After cooling, I used ziplock bags to store them. I cut the used parchment to create layers of them so I can grab a couple of tomatoes at a time from the freezer.
