THAT DIDN’T WORK AS EXPECTED

After making pizza sauce, I had six or eight cups of cherry tomatoes to take care of. These were destined to become tomato powder.

About half of them were the ones I put in the freezer before leaving on vacation, so they were, as expected, mushy when thawed. Too squishy to cut in half (as I should for dehydrating), I decided to do an experiment.

I figured the skins of the thawed tomatoes were already compromised so I put them on one tray of the dehydrator. The tomatoes that were picked last week were pierced with a knife (to give the juice somewhere to escape) and put those on another tray. I added extra trays between them as spacers as running the dehydrator with only two trays is not effective.

The question: Which tray would dehydrate faster and/or more evenly.

After 24 hours, the answer is: Neither. I expected them to take a bit longer to dehydrate this way but in reality, they had made very little progress.

I expected another 24 hours wouldn’t see much more headway either, so I abandoned the experiment. I ran them through the blender, spread the paste on fruit leather trays and returned them to the dehydrator. This is probably what I should have done in the first place.

Time Bomb Peppers

The Time Bomb Pepper harvest has started. I’ve picked one here, one there over the past week.

I decided to taste one to see if they lived up to their heat claims — they are supposed to be between a green pepper and a jalapeno on the Scoville scale.

I really didn’t feel there was a difference between a green pepper and the Time Bomb. That’s too bad as I was looking forward to something with just a little bite.

However,

When I started clearing out the seeds to prepare them for the dehydrator, I could feel that breathlessness that comes from inhaling the fumes of hot peppers and I started coughing uncontrollably. I decided there’s heat in there somewhere, so I dropped the plan to dehydrate them and just cut them up to freeze. Dehydrating hot peppers in the house is not something you want to do!