Recipe: Dehydrated Tomatoes

Am I excited to find this! I just got a book about cooking through dehydration and I have been slowly reading it and it is fascinating. I don’t think, I get it, yet but I am slowly being inspired.

You brought it to life for me when you linked it to My Meatless Mondays. I can’t thank you enough.

Thanks for the recipe! This is a great way to spread out the tomatoe season. My father is a tomatoe aficionado. That is the polite term of a man who obsesses during the winter months on his tomatoe seeds. Who has a binder in which he organizes his seeds with pictures and descriptions which you must go over with him every weekend that you see him until about March. Then he spends all of spring planting his tomatoes and babying them. Around May, he realizes that he planted to many plants so he gives half of them away to other people most of which my sisters and I get the brunt of! (I have 30 plants in my garden.) He has 70 of his beloved tomatoe plants in his garden this year which is down from over 100 last year because he didn’t want my mom to say that he was “obsessive.” This weekend one of the posts for his complex tomatoe suspension system for ultimate garden space utilization fell down due to a storm. I received a panicked call from my mother that my father needed help in the garden. Despite the blood, sweat, tears and the ungodly amount of mosquito bites, we were able to reassemble the structure. This time he added steel reinforcements to the ends. We only had two good sized premature tomatoe infants fall off the structure. Luckily, he was able to save his two casualties. Last year, he grew a 5 pound tomatoe. He was so unbelievably proud of himself. You wouldn’t believe how many pictures he has of that tomatoe. I think it pained him when it was time to eat it. Sometimes, we wonder if he loves his plants more than his family. LOL! Anyhow, I am really excited to give my father another recipe that he can use with the “fruits of his labor!”

I just got a dehydrator and have been looking for ‘recipes’ b/c it didn’t come with many instructions! I have a bunch of tomatoes that I wanted to dehydrate, so I’m glad I saw your post (on the Tuesday recipe linkys!)

Last year we tried dehydrating slices of tomatoes (1/4 inch thick) they turned out really well. We like breaking them up and putting them in soups.

Oh I am so glad that I read this post!! We are harvesting quite a few tomatoes now and this sounds like an awesome way to preserve them/ I am blessed to have a dehydrator so I am going to be doing this like tomorrow!!

Thank you for sharing this. I have loads of tomatoes right now and have been freezing them but I’m excited to try something different.

Hi,
Would you still need to soak these in the water if you weren’t adding the Vitamin C? Or would you just cut them up and dry them out otherwise?
Thanks.

Though that does sound interesting, do dried tomatoes taste the same as fresh tomatoes in curries? And doesnt drying them kill some of the nutrients found in them?

If you dehydrate them well and store them in sealed glass containers they should be good for up to one (1) year.

If you store them in tightly sealed containers & freeze them, they should be good for up to three (3) years.

Learned this in the Master Food Preservation course (1/2 day/week X 5 months) taught by the Univ of ID Agriculture Extension Center in Garden City (Boise), Idaho.

If you are going to buy a dehydrator, Excaliber is the gold standard. That being said, they are expensive. There are other new brands available, but I only have used Excalibur (have 3).
However, the company has a website and you can get re-conditioned dehydrators at about 1/2 price of new ones.
Also, look on Craigs List, or at yard sales. I bought an old Excalibur for $25. It is not pretty-a yucky yellow plastic color- but still works just fine.

The sheets, like Silpat, are also expensive, but necessary to prevent drippings from juicy recipes. BUT, you can find them much less expensively on Amazon, or you can just use Parchment paper on the mesh trays.

When I dehydrate tomatoes, they never get “crisp” – only the texture of a sun dried tomato. So, I cannot seem to grind them into anything more than a paste and the machine groans at that.

What’s the secret to CRISP?

When I dehydrate my romas I cut them in half and sprinkle dried Italian seasoning on them, I makes them so much better!

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