How to Make Sun Dried Tomatoes

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by Renae Chiovaro on August 23, 2012

This time of year tomatoes are plentiful. In my opinion, there is nothing better than a vine ripened home grown tomato! Store bought tomatoes, especially in the winter, don’t compare to the juicy and sweet summer tomatoes. This year my garden has been plentiful and I am preserving what I can for winter. There are several ways to preserve fruits and vegetables: canning, freezing and drying.

One way to preserve tomatoes is to dry them. Sun dried tomatoes add a lot of flavor to recipes. My favorite way to use sun dried tomatoes is in hot pasta with homemade basil pesto. The old fashioned way of making sun dried tomatoes is cutting tomatoes in half and letting them sit covered by a cheese cloth. This method could take up to two weeks. My method is much faster- use the oven!

How to Make Sun Dried Tomatoes

Heat your oven to 200 degrees. Cut Roma tomatoes in half and sprinkle with sea salt. Place on a baking sheet and place in the oven. It takes anywhere from 8-12 hours for the tomatoes to dry. It’s a great project to work on if you have a home day planned or let them cook overnight. Other types of tomatoes work too, although Roma tomatoes have less seeds and juice.

Sun dried tomatoes will store indefinitely. Just make sure that they are dry all the way through. It is a fine line between being too crispy and too wet. They should still be flexible but the moisture should be gone.

Have you every tried to make sun dried tomatoes?

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Renae Chiovaro

Renae is a married working mom of two handsome boys. She works as a registered dental hygienist by day and blogs here at How to Have it All by night. She enjoys cooking from scratch, working in her vegetable garden and functional training.

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Comments

  1. Jeff P. says:
    November 20, 2016 at 4:04 am

    I would love to try this but due to personal beliefs, I feel it is wrong to have an oven on for so many hours to preserve something like a tomato abundance, It’s just not a sustainable practice but I am keen to experiment with an outdoor / homemade wood fired oven and will definitely pass by to let you know if it works. Some people may argue that burning wood is a bad practice but that’s because they do not understand about Trees and the Carbon cycle and how carbon is a naturally occurring gas.
    I followed a recipe where baby plums are cut into about 4-6 slices and baked for only around 1-2 hours, although this did work, many were stuck and not able to be removed from the baking sheet and I ended up with only one jar of preserve. I used two trays roating occassionally in the oven and feel that I should have at the very least made two jars – my preservation method was jarring the tom’s in olive oil and added a few black pepper corns, a garlic clove and a spig of Rosemary.

    Thanks for the recipe, I will use this someday in the outdoor oven experiment :)
    Jeff
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