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Hi, I am David Epstein welcome to Growing Wisdom. If you are a gardener like and you are going to the store during the none growing season, the winter months especially in the northeast. It is hard to find good tomatoes, is it not? But what you can do with the plum tomatoes this time of the year is make your own sun dried tomatoes. Now, we are not really going to put them in the sun but we are going to basically dry this in the oven and this are fantastic to eat alone, they are great on salads, you can mix them on pasta, do all sorts of things with them.
So go to the store, start with some great plum tomatoes and you know what sometimes I even go into the section where the tomatoes, they put them out, they are like half price because they do not look so good. Those are tomatoes that actually work pretty well for this so you can save yourself a little bit of money.
So, cut the tomatoes in half and one of the things you are going to notice when you cut the tomato in half, there is a lot of jelly and the seeds in the middle. We have got to take that out. That is one of the key steps to make this sun dried tomatoes.
So what I will do is, here I am lucky I got the sink right next to me and basically just going to scoop this out. So what I am left with is basically the meat and that is what we are going to dry and you are going to be amazed in what this look like and we will do a bunch of these.
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Use at least five pounds of tomatoes. Do not bother doing like three or four tomatoes. It is just a waste of your oven and a waste of electricity. There are two choices here of ways in which you can prepare the tomatoes. If I want them a little bit crispier, I will use the rack, if I want them a little bit softer I tend to use the cookie shit, also the spray or rack or spray the pan so that they do not stick.
Basically what you want to do is you want to line this up much like you would if you are baking anything, cookies or cupcakes. You do not want them touching each other. You really want the air to circulate around them. The next thing that you want to do, you want to preheat your oven and you are going to put the oven at only 200 degrees. I have actually put some olive oil in this little container here and I have mixed just a little bit of garlic salt, a little bit of oregano, and I have ground in just a little bit of fresh pepper.
So one of the things I am going to do is just simply brush these with a little bit of the olive oil, enough so that you can sort of see the shin of the oil on the tomatoes. Alright so we are going to put this on the oven and we will come back in six hours and see what it looks like.
They really have shrunk, I saved one, and you can see the difference. Just look at how tiny these things are compared to what it look like before we started. So if you are going home to friends or family during the winter months bring them a bunch of these sun dried tomatoes they will think you are quite the chef.
Come back every week for all of our tips, hints and helps here at growingwisdom.com,
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