How to Make Sun Dried Tomatoes

Welcome to The Dish, I'm Natasha, this is your two minute tip to help you cook better food. And today I want to talk about a summer favorite. One of my favorite ingredients to eat during summer time, which are tomatoes. They are in season. They're ripe, they're delicious. They're sweet. It's best time of year to enjoy tomatoes. If you're going to eat tomatoes, make sure it's a summer tomato. And one of the ways that I encourage you to try out eating tomatoes is sun drying them or dehydrating them at home.

When you dehydrate them, you really concentrate all of that flavor. So you get the sweet and the savory flavor of tomatoes packing with a really strong punch. That is absolutely delicious. It's a great addition to lots of dishes. I love it with breakfast eggs, frittatas, omelets. You can pack it into pastas. It goes great with pretty much anything you can think of. It's super, super delicious.

So what you want to do to make your own sun-dried tomatoes, it's very, very simple and easy.

You don't even actually need the sun to do this so you can do it anywhere in the world, no matter what time of year it is or what you have access to -  if you don't have a super hot place that you live in. So what you want to do is you'll get some tomatoes. It's really easy to use like a plum tomato, grape tomatoes, a cherry tomato. Those are all really great.

You're going to slice those in half and then you're going to put them in an oven. A low heat oven. So anywhere from 200, 250 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of hours. So two to three hours it's going to sit in there. And during that time process, it will dehydrate and you'll get that nice and juicy, savory, concentrated flavor. Make sure that you've seasoned that with salt before you cook it. And then after you can also add additional herbs, you can do things like oregano or rosemary time. Those will be wonderful additions to add to your tomatoes.

And then when you're storing those, you'll just want to make sure that you add some oil. Add olive oil, if you're going to be storing these for a longer period of time. Packing it into the oil will help preserve it and keep it for much longer if you're not going to use those immediately.

So that is my two minute tip for you this week. To make some delicious sun dried tomatoes so you can enjoy tomatoes all year long. Get the good stuff in the summertime and then enjoy all year long.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next time.