Despite the fact that I’m complaining about the lack of tomatoes this year (its only me, my better half still thinks there are far to many), we’ve just about run out of freezer space. This is not due to too many tomatoes but rather too much produce from the allotment.
All the fruit at the allotment has harvested well and, despite eating lots of fruit and giving it away to our daughter when she visits, there’s a lot been frozen and the freezers are now more or less full.
So the question comes down to “what to do with the tomatoes?”. Normally I will cook them down to create sauce, puree and ketchup and my plan is to do all of these with the beefsteak and standard sized tomatoes, particularly the red and black varieties. However, this year I have grown a disproportionately large number of cherry tomatoes and a higher than normal percentage of yellow/orange varieties (I need to make a better selection next year). So I decided I would also try dehydrating them. We bought an inexpensive dehydrator earlier in the year and I’ve given it a whirl for a number of things (mushrooms, mangetout peas, beetroot, potatoes, etc.). They’ve worked reasonably well but the dehydrator suffers from inconsistent heat across the racks and so I’ve had to learn to rotate the racks of food as they are drying (its 25C hotter at the bottom to one side than the top at the other). So, having frozen a load of cherry tomatoes whole (they still work in a number of recipes), I decided I would dehydrate some to see how it worked.
I halved or quartered the tomatoes and put them on the racks and then set them to dry. To avoid burning them, I rotated the shelves up and down and round every hour. The tomatoes wen’t on at about 9:30am and were finished at about 6:00pm (eight and a half hours) at which point I left them to cool down overnight before putting them into airtight plastic boxes to keep. (I was going to put them into large Kilner jars but they were much smaller than I was expecting so I didn’t need all the space.
I hope that they will be suitable for Spaghetti Bolognese and things like that, we’ll use some soon so that we can dry more if they have worked.
Pelican Plants: Growing Tomatoes and Peppers 