Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes

In spite of all my pruning and pinching off growing tips to keep my tomatoes from taking over, my two trimmed tomato plants in my little aquaponics garden have been producing tomatoes faster than we can eat them. I've started giving excess tomatoes away but now I've decided to horde them and try my hand at sun dried tomatoes.

If it works well, I'll make a solar drier based on the stuff I learnt from the solar hot water collector experiments I did, but for the time being, I'll knock up a temporary test drier.

I figure I'll need a screen to keep the flies off.

I have a kitchen sieve or two that have so far escaped being destroyed in aquaponics experiments, so I'll use one of those.

And I'll need a couple of tomatoes.

From what I've read, they should be the same size, but I didn't have two ripe ones of the same size so I photographed them to look the same. The closest one is about half the size of the other.

Nobody will know.

So I cut them into sections and thumbed out the seeds.

I pealed two sections as well to try them that way, although it is not normally done that way.

I then found a bowl and a cake cooling rack.

I put the cake cooling rack over the bowl, and spread the tomato sections out over the rack, and put the sieve over the top.

I moved the entire thing out into the sun near an ants nest, so figured I should stand the whole contraption in a big bowl of water to keep crawling things out.

Now we wait. I'm told for a few days.



120 things in 20 years, Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes, and waiting