I found cherry tomatoes 3 pounds for two dollars, so I bought 9 pounds.
Pretty nice tomatoes 🍅;
I bought 6 of these.
First step is to cut each tomato in half;
This cost me a little time, but the knife we as freshly sharpened; so no skin or blood.
After cutting the first one, this was left;
This is when you have to get tough, and stop looking at how many remain!
Nine pounds will totally fill my dehydrator;
The only problem is tomatoes contain a lot of water, so this has to be run a long time to get it fully dried. Don't be tempted to run the temperature higher to cut this time, because the taste suffers if you exceed 150 F°!
Take the time now, and keep the fresh flavor!
It took about 40 hours to get here;
They must be dry enough to snap under load. The other test is when poured they ring on impact.
I dump the dried stuff into a deep kettle;
This is because with all the work done on these vegetables already, and I don't want to spill any before they are packaged!
This filled exactly 2 quarts jars;
These have been vacuum packed at approximately 28 in of mercury with my sealing gear. These will be good for several decades, so these will move to the homestead on the next trip. I may pick up another 9 pounds when I pass that store again, if I can talk my hand into more cutting....
I always look for deals that will stretch my prepping dollar.
Nice one👍
It is good to have this on the shelf!
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Upvoted 🎉
Thanks to curator rycharde
Thanks for the upvote, I'm glad you liked the post!
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I can my tomatoes with the water. They only last 2 years that way, but I grow more every summer, so that's more than enough time for me.
That's a good way to do it! This isn't really canning, just drying and storing. We used to can about 600 quarts of tomatoes using open kettle when I was a kid. They had six kids to feed, and we got free green tomatoes. We watched them as they ripened, and canned them when we got enough built up.
My brother bought the old homestead, and found some tomatoes canned in the basement. He opended and ate them, and said they were tasty; after 25 plus years!
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That's a nice legacy left by the parents!
I should have said "jarring" I guess. I wouldn't know how to store food in metal cans, I've always used glass jars.
Sorry, here canning is used to describe preserving in glass. I have a friend east of here who uses metal cans to preserve meat to ship to the indigent overseas. This is done by his church, and they ship thousands of pounds each year. Apparently glass is too fragile to ship overseas.
But my method is in glass, because that's what I have the gear for.
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