Sweet intensity
Sun-drying concentrates tomato’s natural flavors
Story by Ching Lee • Food photos by Fred Greaves • Processing photos by Richard Green
With their intense sweet and tangy f lavor, sun-dried tomatoes tend to stand out in a cast of ingredients. The shriveled, chewy fruit—often sold packed in oil or just dry—is so potent that chef Evan Elsberry says it ends up being the “target ingredient” in almost any dish in which he uses them. It’s no wonder the dried fruit often earns top billing in recipes, including in one of Elsberry’s first concoctions as an emerging chef some 25 years ago: sun-dried tomato chicken, with mushrooms and basil serving in supporting roles to “fill out the dish.” “It’s never a lost ingredient,” he said of sun-dried tomatoes. “They’re usually the star of the dish.” The product first exploded in popularity beginning in the 1980s, when an economic spike in the U.S. fueled interest in exotic ingredients and imported foods, said Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. “This was just the beginning of artisanal bread and people getting imported cheese and all sorts of luxury items that were markers of wealth and status and culinary know-how,” he said. At the height of the trend, sun-dried-tomato-flavored food products became ubiquitous—showing up in everything from chips and crackers to cream cheese, dips, breads and pasta. Despite that mass-market appeal, sun-dried tomatoes remain a secret weapon of
chefs and home cooks who relish their concentrated f lavors to elevate dishes. “They’re great, they’re versatile—and the best thing is, they last forever,” said Elsberry, owner of Evan’s Kitchen in Sacramento. Versatile and easy to store Myrna Undajon-Haskell, a member of the University of California Cooperative Extension Master Food Preservers of Sacramento, has been making sun-dried tomatoes at home since the 1980s, back when her family farmed tomatoes and other row crops in Santa Clara County. Sun-dried tomatoes were all the rage then, she remembered, so much so that she started to dry her own—and has been drying them ever since. She noted how her family often preserved the fish they caught by drying them, among other foods. But drying tomatoes was a concept she learned from her Italian friends, whom she observed making a paste by drying tomatoes. Before she acquired a dehydrator—an
expensive purchase at that time—Undajon-Haskell sa id she tried dr ying tomatoes in the sun, but worried about attracting bugs. She even tried oven- d r y i ng , a
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