Homemade Sun-Dried Tomatoes

Well okay, these were dehydrator dried tomatoes but same concept. Note that I said dehydrator so that is what these instructions are for. With the heat we have been having across the nation, you could certainly do the rustic sun-dried method and let the sun actually dry them out but I decided to go the lazy route and use my trusty dehydrator.

I had an abundance of tomatoes and I wanted to use as many as I could before I had to start throwing them out to the wild animals that live in our woodline. I love cooking and even baking with sun-dried tomatoes so I figured this would be a great way to use some of these 'maters up.

Now, from everything I read, roma style tomatoes are the best but any kind work. The key is not to have any that are too overripe otherwise they will take forever to pull the moisture from. I just used what I had...
I sliced the tomatoes in half, then scraped out the seeds and pulp out of most of them and even quartered some of those slides. I then sprinkled salt all over the sliced tomatoes. For the last batch (which isn't pictured) I sprinkled salt and Italian Herbs to give a little different flavor.

I lined them up on my dehydrator trayIn my dehydrator these took almost 8 hours to dry (they were a little juicer than I thought, so they took a bit longer). You want them to be dry of moisture but not so dry they crumble.I put most of them in freezer bags and froze to use later. But a few of the regular and a few that I sprinkled Italian Herbs on, I put in jars and covered in olive oil to use for cooking/baking later on.