oven-dried tomatoes

We love our vegetable delivery service, but we can't always use everything before it's too late. So it's good to have a few techniques for preserving or at least elongating the useful life of some of the fruits and vegetables we receive. Here's a technique we tried and loved: oven drying the tomatoes. We adapted this recipe from Big Girls Small Kitchen.

Oven-Dried Tomatoes

Ingredients
5 plum tomatoes, cut into quarters lengthwise
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp herbes de provence
Preheat the oven to 200°F.

Place a dish towel or a layer of paper towels over a cutting board and arrange the tomatoes wih the cut sides up. Sprinkle the tomatoes with salt. Lay another dish or paper towel over the top of the tomatoes and weigh them all down with another cutting board and something heavy such as a small pot of water or a large cookbook. You don't want to squish the tomatoes - just press them a little to release some of the moisture. Let the tomatoes rest this way for about 20 minutes.

Place a wire rack on a baking sheet. Remove the weight layers and towels from teh tomatoes and arrange the slices on the wire rack, leaving about 1 inch between each slice. Sprinkle with the herbes de provence.

Note: don't arrange the tomato slices as shown in the top right photo above or they will fall between the wire as they start to dry! #smrt Arrange them across the wires as shown in the bottom left photo.

Bake the tomatoes for 5 hours. They should be wrinkled and dry to the touch. If you want plumper tomatoes, shorten the drying time. If you want wrinklier tomatoes, leave them in the over longer. It's really up to you. In our dry Colorado climate, 5 hours got us to the consistency pictured above.

Remove the tomatoes from the oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Place them upright in a clean jar with an airtight lid and store in the refrigerator. These should keep for several days.

We used these for one of our hut trip recipes and for a seriously yummy loaf of olive bread - stay tuned for future posts on both of those!