Tomato Powder

Tomato Powder?  That sounds strange.  Never heard of it.  We'll talk a little about it tonight.  The tomato harvest was so plentiful this season, we ran out of jars!  They are still coming in and we are making and eating pico de gallo and many other tomato dishes as fast as we can, but they are still piling up.

Tricia is making a lot of dehydrated tomatoes with sea salt and rosemary and that gave her an idea.  She decided that we would dehydrate tomatoes and then blend into a powder and can it up.  First we had to purchase some additional trays for the dehydrator.  The silicone liners came in and Tricia made up a big batch of tomato sauce on the stove top.

This time instead of water bath canning the tomato sauce in jars, she poured into the new trays on the dehydrator and turned it on.  After a while, the tomato sauce looked like this:

I'm picking it up and it is dry.  The consistency is like that of Fruit Roll ups or fruit "leather."

The tomato "leather" was broken up and put in a blender where it turned into a rich, aromatic powder!

Here is a closer look at it:

What shall we do with tomato powder?  Well this table tells us:

If you mix equal parts powder and water, you get tomato paste.  1 part powder to 3 parts water, and you get tomato sauce.  You can also make soup and juice.  We are canning tomato powder up as well.