dried tomato
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Describing the simple step-by-step process of drying tomato at home with a food dehydrator.
Food: Tomato
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Dehydrate Time: 20 hours
Total Time: 20 hours 10 minutes
According to the Wiki page on Tomato, “botanically speaking” it is a fruit, but “legally” and for “nutritional purposes” it is a vegetable.
drying tomato
tomato
Is tomato fruit or vegetable?
For me, it’s really quite simple: I view big ones like beefsteak tomatoes (the ones on the photo) as vegetables, and small ones like cherry tomatoes as fruits.
I used 4 tomatoes for dehydration.
preparing tomato
To prepare the tomatoes for dehydration, I washed them and cut them into 1cm thick slices. Then, I put the slices onto the drying trays and left them for about 5 minutes to let the watery bits in the middle drip down. This way the juices won’t drip all over the dehydrator. You could also use napkins to soak up those juices, but I didn’t want to waste extra paper.
After that, I placed all the drying trays on the dehydrator.
Preparation is very simple and takes about 10 minutes.
(Of course, if you soak up the watery bits instead of letting them drip slowly, then the prepping takes only about 5 minutes.)
drying tomato
I set the temperature at 50-55°C and left the dehydrator on overnight.
I dried these tomato slices for about 20 hours.
During dehydration, I would describe the strength of the smell as neither strong nor weak, but a rather distinctive smell of bottled or canned tomato juice (not the freshly blended kind of tomato juice).
dried tomato
The dried tomato slices turned a deeper red. The texture is quite hard, especially the seeds.
I wouldn’t say they taste very nice. The dried tomato slices have a much stronger taste of umami than expected—perhaps a little too intense for me to handle. I don’t think they taste much of anything thing else because the umami kind of overwhelms other tastes, but there might a hint of sourness in there.
I don’t really like how the dried tomatoes taste, so I’m not going to eating them as snacks. But obviously food shouldn’t be wasted, so I’ll blend them into juice instead.
