Oven Dried Cocktail Tomatoes

5Flavours

Sun dried tomatoes can be expensive depending on the way they are packaged. Yet, they are wonderfully intense little flavour bombs: ideal for fast, mid week pasta dishes, addition to roasted veggies or even dropping a few into a stew or casserole lacking some “oomph”...

Additionally, we all have the same problem from time to time: lovely cocktail or little vine tomatoes left over from a splendid salad or event. And they’re slowly dying on the kitchen counter or – heaven forbid! – the refrigerator. What to do, what do?

We’ll preserve their goodness by baking them in the oven, off course. OK, maybe ‘bake’ is a too strong a term. We’ll dry them by using the oven’s residual heat after baking or cooking something unrelated.

The process is simple:

1.   Line a Swiss roll pan or baking sheet with grease proof or baking paper.

2.   Halve the cocktail tomatoes and arrange them with at least 2cm separating each half.

3.   Put them into the hot, switched off oven immediately after the last baking or cooking for the day has been done.

4. Leave overnight to dry.

5.   Collect them the next morning into a Ziploc bag and freeze until needed.

6.   For bulk preparation: bake trays of halved cocktail or small vine tomatoes in a convection oven for 4 hours at 120°C (245 deg. Fahrenheit).

Et Violá! Oven dried tomatoes any day as good as shop bought sun dried tomatoes. Your mouth will thank you later.

© RS Young, 2017

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