Dehydrating Tomatoes

I think I will be getting plenty of tomatoes this year and I want to take steps to ensure that they don't go to waste.  I do plan on making the usual batches of salsa and tomato sauce, but I also wanted a little more variety for my storage options, so I choose to dehydrate some.  These tomatoes were my first good sized harvest and there is no way that I will be able to eat them all fresh before they go bad.

The red ones are an indeterminate variety of paste tomato.  The large pinkish ones are Siberian Pink Honey Tomatoes which are also an indeterminate variety.  Both are heavy on the flesh with out a ton of seeds so they should be good candidates for dehydration.  I washed and cored each tomato and sliced them about 3/8 inch thick.  I couldn't fit all of them on the trays that I had, but I filled three trays completely.

They took about 24 hours to be completely dry.  I allowed them to cool for about an hour before I peeled the slices from the trays.  Those three trays of tomato slices filled a quart jar and were only a few ounces compared to the pounds of fruit that I started with.

The final step will be to process the dried slices in my food processor to make a tomato powder.  This powder can be reconstituted into tomato paste or sauce depending on how much water I add to it.  The powder can also be added to soups, stews, dips and many other dishes for flavor.  Powdering the slices also reduces the volume that they take up making storing and using lots of tomatoes very easy.  I also like the minimal work involved in drying the tomatoes.  Simply wash, slice, dry and powder.  Seems to be much less labor intensive than canning tomato sauce and the clean up is pretty easy too.