On a recent Hazon Food Conference Executive Committee phone call, we started talking about the conference menu (which is going to be amazing, by the way).  We got into a discussion about whether or not to serve the requisite tomatoes at the conference with our bagel brunch.  After all, can one really have bagels and cream cheese without tomatoes and cucumber?  On the other hand, if all of the other produce is local and organic, then why should we make this one exception?  On yet the other hand, we could potentially use this conundrum as an opportunity to educate the community about seasonal and local food (the tomatoes would have to be flown in from Mexico), and talk about methods of food preservation. Bingo.

I happen to be spending these three months as a fellow at Adamah, where we spend a great deal of our time in the “Picklearium,” preserving our harvest.  We make pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut, jams, and more, so I volunteered our final tomato harvest (with the blessing of the staff) and my time to bring dried tomatoes to the conference. Why not showcase tomatoes, grown by young Jewish farmers in the summer, at the bagel brunch in December? But how to showcase them? I tried a tomato jam which was very good, but too heavy to ship in quantity, so we settled on oven dried tomatoes, which could easily be brought in plastic bags to California from the east coast.

A group of us gathered in the kitchen on Thursday evening to wash and halve 9 trays of tomatoes. We coated them in a bit of olive oil and sprinkled kosher salt on them. After a few snafus with various ovens, they went in at the lowest temperature (around 180). We checked on them periodically and found that they were drying much faster than we expected (because they were so small), so we combined the trays that had already shrunk, and put them in the ovens overnight. A fellow Adamah fellow got up twice through the night (at 3 am and 5 am) and removed them at 5. I know, I know, it would have been easier with a dehydrator, but we don’t have one, and this was our only chance to use the main kitchen’s ovens. And since Shabbat was arriving anyways, we knew we could sleep later!

The tomatoes are beautiful and flavorful, they truly deserve the blessing “borei pri ha Adamah,” “blessed is the fruit of the earth.” You’ll meet these tomatoes and the young Jewish farmers who preserved them in December at the Food Conference!

Register for Hazon’s Food Conference, here.

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