Dehydrating Heirloom Tomatoes in Oven and in Dehydrator

Temperatures are in the mid-90's every day now with a heat index sitting over 100 degrees even at night. These temperatures and bug pressure signal the end of the 2014 Homegrown Tomato season.  We've had a nice crop and have been able to eat our bellies full, can a bunch of them in several forms and freeze a nice amount as well. To diversify the way we preserve the harvest, and encouraged by our success with drying figs, I wanted to try my hand at drying some tomatoes.  We had several containers of ripened tomatoes from about 14 different varieties that were sitting in the fridge begging for attention, so I obliged.

One of the containers of homegrown toms

Sun dried tomatoes is something that you see on the menus of many recipes.  I'm sure there is a way to dry them outside in the sun, but the obstacles are many.  I think the birds, bugs, flies, and other critters would devour them before they began to dry, so I researched how to dry tomatoes from many different websites and sort of combined different techniques.  I decided to do one batch in the oven using an Oven Drying Technique and then do one batch in the Food Dehydrator.  I'll show you what we did and critique the methods used at the end.

First thing you want to do is cut your tomatoes.  For a small one, just cut it in half. For a larger tomato, you can quarter it or cut it in eighths.  In both cases, you'll want to cut out the stem and core the tomato to remove the hard part in the middle.

Cutting up the tomatoes

The difficulty I faced is I was using many different varieties of tomatoes that were of all different sizes.  Due to the lack of uniformity, I could tell they were going to dry at different rates.  I loaded them on the trays of the Dehydrator.  I like the color differences in the red tomatoes and the yellow ones.

Tomatoes cut and arranged on the dehydrator trays

I also cut up and arranged the tomatoes on the trays that I was going to put in the oven to dry.  With either method, you want to ensure that there is sufficient airflow around the slices, so don't let any of them touch each other.

Toms arranged in trays for the oven drying method

I also like the color difference in the 'green shoulders' of the heirloom tomatoes contrasted against the red. For the oven drying method, I wanted to shake things up a little, so I sprinkled with some kosher salt and went out and picked some rosemary. After washing the rosemary, I pulled off a bunch of it and distributed on top of the cut tomatoes.

Rosemary on top

I set the Dehydrator at 135 degrees and plugged it in at 10 pm and let it run all night and all day long until I got back at 5 the next day.

Dehydrator is on...

For the oven method, I placed them on the middle shelf and set the oven on the lowest setting which for our oven was 170 degrees at 10 pm.  The directions said to leave it 10 - 20 hours (that's a wide range!), but it said to put the oven at 150.  Our oven's lowest setting is 170.  So, I left it on all night until 6 am, turned off the oven when I went to work and then turned it back on for 4 hours when I returned from work at 6 pm.

Oven is on...

You can see the before shot (above) and the after shot (below):

Oven Dried tomatoes

The smell coming from the dehydrator was nice, but the smell from the oven was a fragrant roasted rosemary scent that made me very hungry.  Here is a closer look: Notice how much they've shrunk in size.

Nice!

Now the way you tell that they're done is all dependent upon how 'wet' your tomatoes were, how thick/thin you cut them, and how well the air was able to circulate around them.  They shouldn't be crispy, but rather feel like a raisin, leathery, bendable, but not moist with any water.

Dehydrated

Here are six trays of dehydrated tomatoes using the dehydrator.  All were done perfectly as far as I could tell!  The oven dried method contained one row that was crispy and over-done, but these were eaten.  And Oh!  The flavor!  Delicious, candy-like, scrumptious, I might add...

Dried and Laid to the Side!

I removed them from the trays and packed them into Zip Loc bags, one for the oven dried and one for the dehydrator method, making sure that all the air was squeezed out of the bags.  The directions say to store them in the refrigerator sealed tightly where they will last for a few weeks.  You can also put them in the freezer, tightly sealed, where they will last for 9 - 12 months.

Oven-dried kosher salted with rosemary tomatoes bagged

Dehydrated with no spices or herbs bagged

Review/Critique:

The dehydrator method was more successful in getting uniform drying.  All were about as perfect as you can get them.  The oven-dried method dried inconsistently.  In the future I'll take the time to pick the ones out that are drying at a faster rate, so they don't completely dry out.  Additionally, the oven method, due to the ability to add salt and herbs, had the advantage regarding flavor.  Bottom line: I'll use both methods next year, perhaps using additional herbs like basil, oregano, and garlic for some extra bang.  These will be nice to snack on and cook with and added diversity to our methods of preserving the harvest.