Many years ago, we got a food dehydrator so we could dry our surplus garden tomatoes and make stuff like fruit leather from bountiful summer fruit. One day I was feeling creative and decided to turn too much chili into dried "chili-leather" to take on a camping trip. Why buy expensive dried camping food when you could make your own? Right? Well, I don't remember exactly how long it took to dry the chili, but it was several days. And the whole time it was drying, I was picturing botulism spores growing and multiplying. Would I actually eat this stuff? Feed it to my children? I was practically driving myself nuts between really wanting this to work and fearing a medical rescue from our campsite. Well, we took the stuff camping, re-hydrated and cooked it, stared at it and then consumed it. The taste was a little unusual but no one got sick. And no, I never dehydrated chili again, although I have dried lots of other stuff.
It's that time of year again when we can't give away any more garden tomatoes and we're stuffed to near max with pasta sauce and salad. Time to bring the food dehydrator up from the basement and start slicing and drying. My drier now has the maximum number of trays (12) and if I fill all 12 trays, I end up with about 1/2 a gallon bag of dried tomatoes. I will usually fill about three gallon bags. Because it's so hot here at the moment, it took about 24 hours to dry this batch and now I'm going to pasteurize them in the oven for 10 minutes, let them cool and then pack them into a freezer bag to store in the refrigerator for use during the winter.
My dehydrator is pretty old. When I bought it, there were only two American Harvest models to choose from and I chose the less expensive one. If I were buying today, I'd probably go for a more powerful version so the food would dry more quickly. It originally came with four trays but I quickly found that if I were going to the trouble of drying food, I wanted to dry a lot at one time so I added the maximum number of trays. Even 12 isn't enough when you've got advancing tomatoes and bagfuls of pears.
Above: tomatoes drying on a tray
Below: a bowlful of magnificent dried tomatoes
I'm very careful when I preserve food. I disinfect all the prep surfaces and knives and wash my hands a lot. I've never had a spoilage problem or gotten sick from the food. I love having the dried tomatoes available - they really add a punch of flavor to dishes all year long.
After you have a quantity of dried tomatoes, you could create beautiful jars like this for gifts or to keep.
