DIY – Sun Drying Tomatoes for Preservation
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on August 30, 2009
Tomatoes are one of the tastiest and most popular of garden produce. They’re popular everywhere and are great tasting and fun to grow. The problem is, they don’t hang around very long once they turn ripe. Even if you refrigerate them, they’ll only last a few days before they start to go soft.
One of the most popular ways to preserve tomatoes is by sun drying. It’s extremely easy to do and it saves all of the flavor and usefulness of the tomato for much longer than the refrigerator every can. Plus, it’s completely free!
I sun dried the first of our tomato crop–all that we didn’t just eat right off. With a little preparation, you can have your tomatoes ready to dry in just a few minutes. Here’s how I did mine, totally free of cost.
With sun drying, you have two concerns: plenty of sunlight and a way to keep the bugs/flies off your tomatoes. This is where the preparations come in. Check the weather reports and make sure you’ll have at least a full day of bright sunshine (two is better). So long as it’s above freezing, the temperature isn’t as important, though obviously the hotter the better for speed of drying.
Next, you’ll need a screen for both top and bottom of the tomato slices or a screen and a large chunk of cheese cloth or mosquito netting. For my screens, I took two screens off the windows of our house, washed them, and then used cheese cloth for the topper. Make sure your screen isn’t plastic, as that can warp, leech, or otherwise ruin things. An alternative to a screen is a thin BBQ grille or similar that you can wrap cheese cloth or netting all the way around.
That’s it. That’s all the tools you need. See, told you it was cheap and likely free!
Now slice up the tomatoes into slices about 1/4 inch thick (give or take). Just make sure they aren’t too thick or they’ll not dry all the way out easily. Then lay the slices out in a single layer so that they don’t touch one another. Fill the screen as much as you can.
Then take it outside to your drying spot. This should be sunny, high enough off the ground that critters won’t get to it, and should have good airflow all the way around. I used some metal shelving we have outside already. For the window screens, I put cheese cloth under each corner with a small stick in the center to “tent” it above the tomatoes. This keeps the flies off and keeps the cloth from soaking up the tomato juice. You want that to stay there and just the water to dry off instead. That’s the flavor!
Sandwiching two screens works well too, or using the aforementioned cloth/netting all the way around a grille.
It should take about a day for the tomatoes to either fully dry (if it’s hot) or at least become like leathery jerky (nearly dry). At that point, you can bring them inside and let them finish off indoors if you’d like or put them out for another day. If you need the extra day, make sure to check on them often or to put them where they’ll get shade towards the second half of the day so they don’t over-bake. While you want them dry, it is possible to burn them as well.
Then just put into a jar, container, zipper bags, or whatever. You can store them in any location that doesn’t get moist, so the back of the cabinet, the pantry, etc. are all great places.
You can rehydrate them in warm water if you’d like, crumble them into recipes, or put them straight onto sandwiches. Just eating straight tomato chips is also awesome. Enjoy!
