Preserving
Sun-Drying Tomatoes the Greek Way
Sun drying tomatoes is how my grandmother put a summer’s worth of flavour into a jar that lasted until spring, and it’s still how I do it, on the same flat-roofed drying racks she used. No electric dehydrator, no oven left on for twelve hours. Just salt, screens, and the kind of relentless August heat that this coast has in excess.
Picking the right tomatoes
Not every tomato dries well. I look for smaller, meatier varieties with less internal water and more flesh — plum types and the local ridged variety I also mention in the dry farming vegetables piece do best, since a watery slicing tomato mostly just shrivels into skin.
The method
- Halve each tomato and lay them cut-side up on a mesh screen, never touching.
- Salt lightly — this pulls moisture out faster and helps deter insects.
- Set the screens somewhere with full sun and, ideally, a breeze, off the ground.
- Bring them inside every night. Damp night air undoes a day of drying.
- After three to five days, depending on heat, the tomatoes should be leathery, dark red, and pliable but not brittle.
Storing them properly
Once dry, I pack the tomatoes into sterilised jars, layered with olive oil, a bay leaf, and a sliver of garlic. Fully submerged in oil and kept somewhere cool and dark, they keep well past Christmas. If any tomato still feels soft or damp in the middle, it isn’t ready — under-dried tomatoes are the single most common cause of spoiled jars.
Why bother when you can just can them
Canning is faster and I do plenty of it too, but sun drying tomatoes concentrates the flavour in a way that boiling water never does — closer to a sun-ripened raisin than a stewed tomato. It’s also a technique that scales down easily: a single afternoon’s harvest is enough to fill one small jar, no pressure canner or specialist equipment required. For a heavier, longer-season preserving project that pairs well with this one, see our notes on rainwater harvesting, which is what keeps the tomato plants productive long enough to make drying worthwhile in the first place.