Gardenist: Putting Them on the Sill

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Oct 2, 2007 7:30PM

With all the tomatoes coming out of our backyard, the only thing we've done to preserve them was cook them down into a sauce, then freeze what we're not immediately using. We made some homemade grilled pizza last week and bought sun-dried tomatoes for use as a topping. After we finished we sat back and found that insanely ironic; given the yields of tomatoes that we've been getting from the garden there was no reason we couldn't be sun-drying tomatoes at home.

Better late than never, we say.

From what we’ve researched about sun-drying tomatoes, it’s a relatively simple process if you have a dehydrator (we don’t) or an oven (we try to keep our gas bill as low as possible). So we cut them some cherry tomatoes in half lengthwise, placed them skin side up on top of some parchment paper, lightly salted them with fresh ground sea salt, and currently have them drying on a window sill in the kitchen.

Since the weather forecast calls for lots of sun mid-week, we expect to have some nice sun-dried tomatoes in about four days. When fully dried, they should be pliable and leathery to the touch, with a concentrated sweetness with the water removed. They make great additions to salads, entrees, and homemade pizzas (another thing we’ve been making a lot lately), and they can easily be rehydrated with a soak in water. If you don't want to leave tomatoes on the sill for four or five days in the sun, you can dry them in a 140° oven for 10-12 hours.