Which varieties of tomatoes are best to dehydrate

Last Updated on June 20, 2024 by Michelle

Why Dehydrate Tomatoes?

My dehydrator is my best friend these days. The garden surplus is overwhelming and I hate heating up the kitchen all day long to can tomato sauce. In fact, I have never been a fan of canning tomatoes. I felt like I boiled them down all day long and my final product was never quite right.

But dehydrating? Yes, please!

The dehydrating process completely retains a food’s original nutritional value! Most food preservation decreases a food’s nutritional content, but dehydrating retains all the protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and vitamins. Amazing, right?

Given that scientific studies have shown that eating tomatoes decreases risk of cancer (source), not to mention all the other healthful reasons to enjoy veggies, dehydrated tomatoes are my new favorite thing.

And it’s so easy to slice up the tomatoes, fill the trays, and turn the dehydrator on. That’s it. And I’ll have amazing tomatoes all winter long. I list the many ways to use dehydrated tomatoes right here.

Which Tomatoes are Best for Dehydrating?

I grew 6 varieties of tomatoes in my garden this year and I can definitely tell you they are not all created equal when it comes to dehydrating. Some varieties of tomatoes are definitely better for dehydrating than others. But I should add that you can do a bang-up job dehydrating absolutely any tomato, so if you have a less-than-ideal variety on hand, don’t be discouraged, your results will still be fantastic.

I’m going to break down the 6 varieties I dehydrated this year and share the results with you.

Golden Queen

Golden Queen tomatoes are not only a gorgeous orange color (I love using them–and Lemon Boys–in salsa), but they’re wonderfully meaty, with not a lot of seeds. This means they’re less watery than most tomatoes and great candidates for nice, efficient dehydrating.

Not to mention that fresh-sliced Golden Queen tomatoes have been the backbone of some of the best BLTs all summer long around here.

Blue Beauty

This was my first year growing Blue Beauty tomatoes, but I’m in love. They’re so pretty on the vines, almost looking like large, gorgeous plums. The tops are deep blue and the bottoms a pretty pink/purple color. While the tomatoes are average with amount of seeds/juice when you slice them, they slice so evenly and nicely. The fact that they make firm, easy, uniform slices made them my favorite to dehydrate this year.

And, bonus, they retain their gorgeous skin color after they’re dehydrated.

Lemon Boy

I love the flavor and surprising color of a Lemon Boy tomato. They’re my favorite tomato addition to both tossed salad and pico de gallo. But they’re my least favorite tomato to dehydrate. They’re very watery and have a good amount of seeds, so they seemed to take longer in the dehydrator than most other varieties and they final outcome was more fragile and flimsy than many others.

German Pink

I love a perfect sized tomato that offers a generous, meaty slice to make the perfect tomato sandwich or BLT. These German Pink tomatoes have never let me down. So I was very happy to find out how wonderfully they dehydrate as well. They’re pretty efficient at dehydrating and easy to slice uniformly too. It may be a drop-dead three-way tie between German Pink, Golden Queen, and Blue Beauty, honestly.

Hillbilly

I’ll be straight out honest about this variety. I saw the name of it years ago and wanted to grow it immediately, just because it was a nod to my daddy, my gardening inspiration who always referred to himself, without reservation, as a hillbilly.

It turns out this Hillbilly tomato is a good tomato. A little seedier and juicier than is ideal for dehydrating, but it yields a nice result. It just doesn’t get as dry as I would like, as quickly as a meatier variety.

Black Cherry Tomatoes

These Black Cherry tomatoes are my favorite cherry tomatoes. I love their large size that makes them so easy to chop up quickly for pico de gallo. Yet they’re not too big to pop in your mouth in one large bite of an antioxidant-ladden snack. It turns out they dehydrate well too, as far as cherry tomatoes go.

Cherry tomatoes, by their nature, take a much longer time to dehydrate than large slices of less seedy, less watery tomatoes. And I guess you could say these extra-large cherry tomatoes are a little more of a hassle to prepare for the dehydrator trays than smaller cherry tomatoes, which simply need to be cut in half. To reduce the dehydrating time, I like to slice out the middle section of these, creating two halves along with the middle slice.

Cherry tomatoes shrivel up to tiny little dehydrated tomatoes, but these extra-large ones are still a nice little size. And their dark, almost black, color sure makes a pretty dehydrated tomato.

In an upcoming post I’ll break down the details on how to dehydrate tomatoes. And in my last post, I listed 10 ways I love to use dehydrated tomatoes.

What is the Best Dehydrator?

I have tried many different dehydrators over the years, trying to save money with lower priced ones. I’ve also dehydrated many herbs by hanging them to air dry and many veggies by spreading them out on baking trays on the dashboard of my car on a hot sunny day.

While there are many ways to dehydrate without fancy equipment, and many lower priced dehydrating machines on the market that are fine, I can tell you I will never go back to any other way now that I have found the top echelon of dehydrators.

This is my dehydrator and I whole heartedly recommend it to anyone who asks.