Oven "Sun-Dried" Cherry Tomatoes

Learning how to make homemade Oven "Sun-Dried" Cherry Tomatoes is an absolute game-changer for your kitchen. Traditional sun-dried tomatoes are incredibly flavorful, but leaving them out in the sun requires perfect weather conditions, low humidity, and multiple days of patience. Fortunately, your oven can recreate that exact same intense, sweet, and chewy texture in just a fraction of the time! By slow-roasting your tomatoes at a very low temperature, you gently evaporate their water content without actually cooking or burning them. This process concentrates their natural sugars and umami flavors, resulting in little flavor bombs that are perfect for elevating almost any dish. Since you have highly perishable fresh cherry tomatoes on hand, this is the ultimate preservation method to ensure nothing goes to waste. Cherry tomatoes are actually the best variety to use for oven-drying because their small size means they dry out much faster than larger, meatier tomatoes, and their natural sweetness becomes wonderfully amplified. Once your Oven "Sun-Dried" Cherry Tomatoes are shriveled and perfectly chewy, the best way to store them is by packing them tightly into a glass jar with fresh garlic cloves and submerging them completely in high-quality olive oil. Not only does this preserve the tomatoes, but it also creates a magnificent tomato-and-garlic-infused oil that you can later use for salad dressings, tossing with pasta, or dipping your wholewheat bread. Try tossing these concentrated tomatoes into your salads, folding them into scrambled eggs, or blending them into dips!