Pic of  Oven “sun-dried” tomatoes

Oven “sun-dried” tomatoes

Show ingredients

Simple cooking & prep

Oven “sun-dried” tomatoes

Serves 4 3h 30 min

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
Image of  Oven “sun-dried” tomatoes

Method

Prep time: 30 min
Cooking time: 3h
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

You may also like…