Nix the idea - really.

It would be a waste of good tomatoes!

And don't forget - there's the good old fashioned oven that we used long before the electric dehydrators!

Mama,

I just gotta' make some dried tomatoes, I want to make some of those like you can buy in the store (Sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, they are delicious) but I sure do not want to waste tomatoes, so I just know I have got to do it right!

A long time ago I used the kitchen oven and made some dried veggies and they tasted pretty good. I am going to just give it a try once this summer just to satisfy my curiosity if nothing else. I may just wind up using the kitchen oven as you mentioned! I was really trying to look at all the alternatives one has in drying, and you must have been reading my mind because I had just about decided to go with the oven!

Thanks, Cathy

The only thing with the oven - if it's really hot outside, having the oven on can make it a bit more uncomfortable.

The oven has worked for decades - it won't fail you.

The oven was also the first slow cooker/crockpot - low temperature cooking freeing up the needed time to do the canning, laundry (on the scrub board). scrub the floors on your hands and knees, etc. Those wonderful good old days!

There are two potential problems with stoves, and a third if you have one of those new smart stoves:

1. The lowest setting, on modern stoves, is too high. My oven's low setting, for instance, runs at 170F. At that temperature you are cooking the food, not drying it.

2. Assuming your low setting is low enough (they used to run at 125F, which is fine), make sure and leave the door open a crack, so the evaporating moisture can escape.

3. Many of the smart stoves have a built-in "safety" feature. If the oven is on for X number of hours the oven assumes you left it on by mistake, and shuts itself off. Obviously, that won't work for drying foods.