How to prepare and dry tomatoes in a solar drier

We finally had a big enough tomato harvest to fill up a tray in our solar dryer. If you don't know what a solar dryer is, check out our tutorial article about how we built ours: https://spheraterra.live/the-solar-dehydrator-absolute-beginner-s-guide

The first step is to cut the tomatoes in halves and push your finger in the middle to get out some of the juice and seeds. The opened tomatoes will dry faster this way and we get to save some seeds for the next year.

Once the tomatoes are placed on the tray, we add pepper powder and salt all over them. The salt and pepper helps preserve the tomatoes better. The pepper is particularly good at keeping away insects and flies that will try to taste the delicious juice.

The tomatoes are good to go. I expect them to be ready in 2-3 weeks if the weather stays hot. If there is a rainy period I recommend you not to start drying tomatoes because they do mold very fast on humid days.

Bonus: We already dried a batch of basil and it went very well for leaves that hold this much water. The magic of dried veggies is when you store 3 buckets of basil leaves in a 300ml jar and you get to keep most of the nutrients and vitamins.