Oven dried tomatoes

Today we made a batch of oven dried tomatoes... they are the less expensive version of "sun dried tomatoes" You can use them in any recipe that calls for sun dried at a fraction of the cost... so here is what you do....

Have you cutest sous chef help you out by taking all the seeds and inners out of the tomatoes. Today we used grape tomatoes, I usually use roma but this is all I had on hand today so it is what I used... Ok now a note here you are drying them so you want them as dry as you can get them before you start.... don't go crazy just take the juice and seeds out of the middle...

So they look like this (below)

Season them up with a little garlic paste (see earlier post about garlic paste) salt, pepper...

And some olive oil

Give them a gentle toss

Then put them on a cookie sheet (or as we used here a cast iron pan... all my cookie sheets were dirty from making cookies and I really didn't want to wash them! :o)

See they are looking yummy already! Heat your oven to 250-275 and pop them in.


This is them half way through the cooking time... this is when I would take them out if I were using them in a sauce and I wanted the flavor of roasted tomatoes but not the chewy texture of dried tomatoes.. but alas today I want dried so we let them cook...



and cook... and forgot they were in there so a few of them burnt but.. I got enough for what I needed them for tonight.. I lost about 12 of them :o( but hey it happens. You want them dry and chewy and not crispy, think raisin not potato chip! ;o)


You can toss these in a salad, in just about any dip, the possibilities are endless! Now at this point if you cover them in olive oil they will stay in your fridge for about forever or you can baggie them dry and freeze them and they will stay forever.. I usually just bag them I like them better that way.


Now a note here.. I am a roasted garlic girl... I could eat the stuff alone (ok not quite, but almost) but if we had added roasted garlic to this we would have had burnt garlic... we needed the garlic to roast along with the tomatoes to flavor them.