Tomatoes are all about summer. The plant needs so much sun that it grows only during summer. But you can keep tomatoes for other seasons by turning them into sauce, freeze them or canning them. These different preservation methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. But for beginners, freezing them would be the best choice as canning or turning them into sauce will take more time, efforts and actually take extra skills.
Tomato is one of the most popular vegetable as it is often the companion to the star of a dish or even a big part of the dish itself. Dishes like stuffed tomatoes or tomato salad are the examples where tomatoes are the star of the dish. AS for most Italian food, the tomatoes are a garnish or companion. Take the sauce in the spaghetti, or sun dried tomato for the pizza topping. Even though they are not the star of these Italian dishes, but you cannot imagine having to take a bite to those dishes without tomatoes in it.
The sun dried tomato is known to have two mixing flavors, sweet and sour. These mixtures of flavor complete the dish. This is another brilliant idea if you are so tired of eating other types of preserved tomato such as salsa, ketchup and tomato sauce. Of course from the name, sun dried tomato; we get a great description that the dish needs to be dried under the sun. In fact, it needs a couple of days under the sun to get the result that we need. Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of sun. You may live in an area where sun is a luxury or you may be living in a location with sun but you are in a shady apartment that it is impossible for you to try and dry those tomatoes. If you are experiencing one of those cases, then you can turn to gas heat instead of sun.
If you do the right things, even with gas heat, you can turn the fresh tomatoes into the chewy sweet and sour sun dried tomato. The method that you can use is slicing the tomatoes into the right size first, then you simply put them in the oven at a low temperature. The low temperature will help you to zap the tomatoes of their moisture and then they would be nothing but raisin lie remains. The size will be reduced to one third size of the actual slice that you put in the oven. Have a nice try!
