By now you must know that I live in one giant gloom bucket. Washington is beautiful…stunning in fact, but like every stunner, it’s very high maintenance. Summer was two months long this year. The rest of the year (or the six months I’ve lived here rather) it rained or threathened to. So when I finally got up off my butt and decided to make sun-dried tomatoes, summer was long gone.
What the heck.
I’d heard of the oven method and it did seem like a piece of cake.
WRONG.
I got impatient waiting for the oven to do its thing for 6 hours and I just ate them un-sun-dried. Un-sun-dried. I just made that up on my own. I’m such a unicorn sometimes.
This time, I waited 6 hours and 17 minutes. Voila. They shriveled up and died and that was a very good thing. I used this recipe as a guide of what I wanted my ingredients to be. I left out the sugar but you don’t have to. I didn’t want to mess with the inherent sweetness the tomatoes already had. Plumpy yumpy things.
Now on a perfectly related note, if you were wondering if tomatoes are fruits or vegetables, let Science Bob help you with that.
Oven-dried sun-dried tomatoes
Ingredients
- 3 Roma tomatoes (sliced in two, length-wise)
- 3 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
- Dried herbs like thyme, oregano and basil
- 4 garlic cloves, chopped
- 1 1/2 tablespoons sea salt
- Fresh ground black pepper
Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees F (90 degrees C).
Slice the tomatoes and lay them cut-side up on a cookie sheet lined with aluminium foil.
Season the tomatoes with sea salt and leave them at room temperature for 15 minutes. This will get some of the water out of the tomatoes, which is what you need to do for that sun-dried state of mind anyway.
Flavour the tomatoes with the remaining ingredients…Oh the bright fresh flavours. If it’s smells amazing, it will taste amazing. Place the sheet into the oven and let it sit for 6 hours (or more*), until you see the tomatoes are shriveled up and the juices have run out.
Take the out of the oven, cool, chop and enjoy over pasta in a cream sauce or as a stuffing for mushrooms. Or not. I just ate them whole.
*The drying time depends on the ripeness of the tomato. If you feel you need to go over the 6 hours as stated in the recipe, do it! Just remember to keep a check on them every half hour extra.
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