Simple cooking & prep
Oven “sun-dried” tomatoes
Making your own sun-dried tomatoes is easy to do at home in the oven, and a great way of preserving them and using up a glut. Combined with fresh oregano, garlic and black pepper, the intensified flavour is just incredible. This is quite a time-consuming process so it’s a good idea to make a big batch and store in olive oil.
Cook's notes
We used larger tomatoes, but you could use cherry tomatoes too – just halve them instead of quartering.
Ingredients
- 1kg tomatoes
- 4 garlic cloves
- 20g fresh oregano
- olive oil
- sea salt
Method
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Step 1
Quarter the tomatoes. Use a knife cut the core out and remove the seeds. Discard or keep aside to add to another recipe, i.e a tomato sauce. Put the tomatoes into a colander and sprinkle with a generous amount of sea salt. Sit the colander over a bowl for 20 mins. Rinse with water to remove excess salt.
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Step 2
Make a paste by finely crushing and chopping the garlic and oregano together with a touch of olive oil. In a bowl, mix with the tomatoes, ensuring they are all evenly coated. Season with salt and pepper. Arrange on greaseproof paper on oven trays, cut side up.
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Step 3
Set your oven to the lowest temperature setting, and put the trays of tomatoes in. They will take a fair while to dry completely, around 3 hours. Check regularly. If they start to brown, then the lowest temperature setting is too high, so keep the door ajar.
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Step 4
Once dried, they should have become wrinkled and slightly shrivelled. Leave to cool. Store in olive oil in an airtight, sterilized jar in the fridge.