Have you ever grown or seen Juliet tomatoes at the market. They’re kind of like a mini roma tomato and while they are too small for me to bother peeling and canning whole they are just the right size to dry. There are lots of methods for drying tomatoes including the age-old sun-dried variety. A few years ago I picked up an excalibur dehydrator on craigslist and that is what we use for all of our drying.
I’ve been drying the juliets from our garden all summer as they’ve ripened but I also ordered a half-bushel from the farm for an all out, run the dehydrator non-stop for a week, drying bonanza. Next year I should really try to get a quarter bushel at a time. We cut each tomato in half and toss them on the dehydrator tray. They should be arranged cut side up but honestly, there are just too many of them for me to worry about it.
They shrivel down to a pretty small size, nickel or quarter sized I’d say, so I usually use more than a recipe calls for. Most often I rehydrate them in some hot, even boiling, water before adding them to a dish but this year I want to experiment with grinding them up into a powder and adding it to sauce and soups. The flavor is so intensely tomato. We store them in a couple of vacuum-sealed canisters and I keep a small jar of them in the kitchen pantry.
