Oven-dried tomatoes

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Oven-dried tomatoes - ready for the oven

Oven-dried tomatoes - the colourful ingredients

A version with hot and sweet peppers and tomatoes

If you don't have hot Mediterranean sun to dry your tomatoes, try this method instead:

It's really tasty way to use up a glut of tomatoes, especially the split and 'spoilt' ones. This year, our Sungold tomatoes were not the same as they usually are, they had tough, flavourless skins and were pretty nasty, truth be told. I tried this experiment on the remaining harvest and from a preliminary taste while they are still cooking, I wish I had more of them!

This makes a brilliant pizza topping.

Ingredients

• 30 tomatoes, washed and halved (top to bottom). Cut larger ones into smaller pieces so they are all a similar size.
• 5 cloves of Garlic, peeled and crushed
• 2 teaspoons fennel seeds, crushed in a pestle and mortar
• 1 tablespoon demerara sugar
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Plenty of olive oil

Mise en place

• Preheat the oven to 100° C (225° F - gas ¼)

Method

1. Lightly oil an oven tray
2. Distribute the halved tomatoes, skin-side down
3. Put the garlic, 3 tablespoons olive oil, sugar, fennel and half of the salt in a bowl and ensure that is well mixed.
4. Spoon the mixture over the tomatoes
5. Season with pepper and the remaining salt and drizzle well with olive oil
6. Roast for 6 hours or until there is just a tiny amount of liquid left. Keep your eye on them because once all of the liquid evaporates,, they burn really quickly. Once properly roasted they will be like little toffee taste bombs. If you don't eat them all immediately, store them in a lock and lock box in the fridge

Serving suggestions

Eat like sweets or scatter over a salad

Chef's notes

I used basil flavoured oilve oil, just because I had some spare, use any flavoured oils and experiment with different herbs and spices.

Variations

I recently tried a variation using home grown sweet peppers, home grown chili peppers and tomatoes. I roasted them and left them a little wetter than I normally would then blitzed them in a food processor with a metal blade. The resulting purée is now in the fridge, ready for the next batch of pizza making!

See also

• Sun-dried tomato recipe