Drying food is great for campers and hikers, but home cooks have good reason to use this cooking technique to make oven-dried tomato slices. Why? Simply because they deliver intense tomato flavor to vegetarian sandwiches . Let’s not forget that tomatoes are technically a fruit with high sugar content. Without moisture, tomato flavor becomes super concentrated in a similar way raisins do with grapes. After you dry them in the oven, you will have actually made sun-dried tomatoes.
Aside from the benefit of intensified flavor, oven-dried tomato slices also contribute to a less messy sandwich. I have a friend who always hated tomatoes in sandwiches and salads because they make everything soggy. I thought about it, and she was right. While tomatoes are a popular source of moisture to a sandwich, the acid in tomato juices also break down other delicate ingredients, making things mushy if you don’t eat it fairly soon. This is exactly why I always subconsciously avoid buying pre-made sandwiches with tomatoes at cafes.
A few things to remember
Oven-dried tomato slices are super easy to make, but there are two key things to keep in mind. You have to be really patient, and you must cut them quite a bit thicker than normal. Most fruits are about 90% water, so that’s a lot of moisture to be extracted. The typical ¼” tomato slices will become paper thin when dried out, so for this recipe you should cut them about ⅜”. Without a ruler, I used the height of my pinky finger as a gauge. Each slice will also shrink considerably in diameter, so you need to buy more tomatoes than you would think. One large 13″ x 18″ sheet pan fits 4 average-sized vine tomatoes. The drying process will take at least 3 or 4 hours.
Vine tomatoes should be used for this because of their sweetness and size. Roma tomato slices would end up too small in diameter after drying, and the larger beefsteak tomatoes fall short in moisture and flavor. If you can get your hands on some beefy heirloom tomatoes, they would be divine for oven drying.
Oven temperature should be as low as possible. Several recipes call for 250 degrees, which I certainly tried. However, my oven could not maintain such a low level of heat and it eventually shut off. So I had to increase the temperature to at least 300 and they did just fine. Definitely play around with the temperature depending on your oven’s capability. A food dehydrator is really the ideal thing to use if you have one, but they’re quite bulky, so be assured that you don’t really NEED one for this.
Oven-Dried Tomato Slices
What you need
- vine tomatoes
- olive oil
- 13″ x 18″ sheet pan with a wire rack
- patience
For better flavor, use tomatoes that are still attached to a vine.
What to do
- Pre-heat oven to 275 degrees.
- Brush your wire rack of your sheet pan with olive oil to prevent sticking.
- Cut your tomatoes crosswise into ⅜” thick slices and arrange them on a wire rack in one layer with none overlapping.
- Place the pan in the oven and let them cook slowly for about 3 hours, rotating the pan 180 degrees after 1 ½ hours. Keep an eye on them as the 3rd hour approaches because some smaller slices will dry out faster if your thickness was inconsistent. Remove each one from the oven as they finish.
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