Freeze-Dried Cherry Tomatoes

I’m surprised that I haven’t yet freeze-dried tomatoes from our garden. The last time I did this, it seems I purchased them from the store. Well, now that we have tomatoes in our garden and, worse, we didn’t sell very many at our local Farmer’s Market, my wife encouraged me to freeze-dry them. I started with nearly ten pounds of cherry tomatoes:

But after only filling about three trays with the cherry tomatoes, I had to use some other tomatoes we picked:

Don’t ask me what type of tomato they are; my father-in-law planted them and forgot. 🙂

Here’s what the cherry tomatoes looked like after washing and quartering them, and the larger tomatoes after dicing them:

Into the freeze-dryer they went! At some point the following morning, I realized that things weren’t going right. As it turns out, the freeze-dryer door didn’t seal properly–a problem I’d had in the past but never properly fixed–so the unit was complaining about not pulling a vacuum. And of course, I forgot to take a photo. Ultimately, I got it going again, though I don’t know quite how much time was lost. After about 51 hours, they looked like this:

And here’s a close up of the cherry tomatoes:

After it was all said and done, I wound up with 11.1 ounces of freeze-dried tomatoes. I can’t say exactly how many pounds I started with because I only remembered to weigh the cherry tomatoes, but I’d say it was at least 15-16 pounds. That said, I didn’t toss about two dozen cherry tomatoes because they’d split too badly, and there was some waste from the larger tomatoes. That said, it still amazes me how much water is in food, especially tomatoes!

As always, I like to do comparison shopping. But the closest I could find on Amazon was this 4 ounce pack for $11.90. A brief search online found a #10 can of freeze-dried tomatoes (also listed as 4 ounces, which is surprising) for $19.99 on beprepared.com.

I also like to calculate electricity costs, but that’s a tad more difficult because our utility company has us on a variable rate during the weekdays, charging us four times the “normal” rate from 4-8 pm. But a little bit of math suggests we spent about $4.50 on electricity. Add in roughly $1 for each Mylar bag and oxygen absorber combination (if I remember that correctly) and I spent about $9.50 in total. That excludes my time, of course.

What do you think? Worth it?