Normally when I peel tomatoes and cut off all the trimmings I throw the scraps into the worm farm or compost bin.Although not being thrown away entirely I was interested when a fellow canner Bev told me that she dehydrates all her clean vegetable scraps and powders them to add as flavourings and binders down the track.
So recently when I made my Zesty Salsa I kept all the tomato skins and the capsicum offcuts and froze them so that when I returned to the farm the next time I could remember to bring the dehydrator back and process them.
So after defrosting and drying them a bit on paper toweling I arranged all the tomato skins and capsicum bits evenly over my 5 dehydrator trays, stacked them up and set it going.
I checked it after about 3 hours and it was about half dry, so let it keep going for a few more hours.
When I checked again after about 6-7 hours they were all nice and crispy and ready to grind up.
I placed them into my wonderful ancient food processor and ground the heck out of them until they started to become a type of powder.
Some of the mix certainly become powder much quicker than the rest ,so I passed it all through a strainer to separate the finer powder and then returned the balance to grind again.
My results were mixed, some lovely finer tomato powder that will be a wonderful binder for meatballs that I want to can, instead of the usual flour that is unsuitable for canning. The rest is a much coarser mix, that will still be very usable in soups ,casseroles,stews ect as added flavour.
Maybe my old food processor isn't the greatest at grinding and I may have had a better result with a different grinding machine, but overall I was quite pleased with the results and will certainly be doing more of it with other vegetable bits and pieces as well. I think the vegetable powders will be a wonderful flavour enhancement to many recipes for me in the future.
Thankyou for coming to visit,
Until we meet again,
Cheers to all,
Jane.
