Freeze-Dried Tomatoes, Peppers

My wife’s friend gave her four pounds of tomatoes last week, so I decided I would freeze-dry them because my wife didn’t have any use for them:

As usual, I had no idea as to how many slices I was going to get out of them, but after some rearranging, I got about three trays (though I initially only used two and a half trays):

So, I went out to the garden to look for some more, larger tomatoes, but came up empty.

Rather than running my freeze dryer with two trays missing, I decided to improvise and pick some bell peppers (I don’t know how much they weighed):

I was able to slice up enough to fill out the final two trays:

After about twenty-two hours or so, the freeze-dryer thought it was done. As always, the first thing I do is to pick a piece or two and taste it. But I was concerned when I saw several of the tomato slices look like this:

They appear to have some crystalized white bubbles on them. I assumed at the time that it was water which hadn’t fully sublimated, though after some research, I found out that it’s normal and occurs on foods with lots of sugar. I didn’t know that at the time, so I removed the two trays of peppers and let the freeze dryer run a few hours longer.

Here are the peppers when finished:

They seemed to shrivel up a bit, but were crispy (and surprisingly tasty).

And here are the tomatoes:

Here, again, I had trouble getting them off the trays without using a spatula. They weren’t as difficult to remove as the pineapple was, but I bought some silicone mats to help make this easier in the future rather than continuing to use parchment paper.

Here’s another look at the tomatoes that had lyophilization occur (the crystallized bubbling):

I decided to keep the tomato slices out that exhibited lyophilization just in case it was water that was going to later melt and ruin the tomatoes, but even after several days nothing has changed and they taste great, too!

Ultimately, I ended up with a little more than 3.5 ounces of tomatoes (from about four pounds initially) and 2.2 ounces of peppers (didn’t weight them before freeze-drying):

One thing I noticed, yet again, is that the foodsaver bags (the clear bag in the photo above) doesn’t always seal for some reason. I can tell because they start off relatively rigid but not long after the bag is clearly flimsy. I even tried re-sealing the bag again but something failed. I gave up and tossed the bag in our pantry for later use.

When this used to happen in the past, I’d always attributed it to something inside the bag poking through or causing a hard edge for something external to rub against it and wear thin, but I can’t see how freeze-dried tomatoes or pineapple is causing that. I’d say about a third of what I’d sealed in foodsaver bags had this problem, which is disconcerting. For the meantime, I’m going to skip using foodsaver bags and only use Harvest Right Mylar bags.

If interested, I found a #10 can of freeze dry tomato powder by Augason Farms for $33.44 online, but I couldn’t find any freeze-dried tomatoes, though I didn’t look real hard. I was, however, able to find a four ounce jar of red bell peppers for $23.98.

This was the first time I’d tried to freeze-dry two different vegetables at the same time, and it worked well enough, though I’m hesitant to do so again because of the possibility one vegetable will retain more water than the other, thus causing a problem. But we’ll see how it goes in the future.