How to Make Tomato Powder from tomato skins
If you are a frugal gal like me who also hates to see food waste, you might just get excited to learn how to make homemade tomato power from tomato skins.
Basically you are taking something (the tomato skins) that you would normally throw away after canning the tomatoes to make sauce or stewed tomatoes and turning them into tomato powder to use in your kitchen.
Before, I would have added the skins to the compost or fed them to my chickens, but making something for my pantry is such a great way to use up the tomato skins.
Step by step – How to make Tomato Powder
First you need to get your tomato skins off of your tomatoes. You can do this several ways, but most likely if you are reading this, you already have skins waiting for you or a project that will be giving you a pile of skins as leftovers.
If not, you will be getting your skins off your tomatoes when you are using them to make sauce or some other tomato product, and that is when you want to be using them to make tomato powder.
I used skins (which also had seeds) from using my food mill. The mill separates the skins (and seeds) from the tomato product I was using for sauce. Ideally I would not have had the seeds included, but didn’t want to waste that big pile of skins.
Other ways to remove the skins are to freeze your tomatoes whole. When they are defrosted, the skins will slip right off. See tutorial here. Most of the time people freeze the tomatoes because their garden is giving them too much to deal with at the present time. Freezing is a great way to can those tomatoes at a later time. It also makes skinning them easy.
The third way is to boil a big pot of water and dunk the tomatoes in for a few seconds. Before putting the tomato in, slice an x on the bottom. When you see the skin peeling back, take out the tomatoes and get them into an ice water bath. Once cool, the skins will peel off easily.
After you have a pile of tomato skins waiting for you, you will need to dry them out. I used my food dehydrator and laid them out in a single layer. It was a bit tedious because the food mill made the pieces pretty small. But you want them separate so they will dry.
You can also use your oven with some parchment paper on your baking sheet. Use a low temperature until the skins are brittle.
After the skins are dried out, you will use something to crush them up. You can use a coffee bean grinder, blender, or mortal and pestle.
I used the blender attachment on our Ninja blender. It did not blend the skins into a super fine powder like a coffee bean grinder might have, but I was happy with the size. I did not want to clean out the grinder for this one little job. If you want it very fine, the blender won’t do the whole job.
Once you get the skins broken down to the size of your liking, that’s it! All you need to do is store it in an airtight container. I like to repurpose old jam jars that I can’t use for canning for things like this.
Keep it stored where it will be out of light and heat so that it will last longer.
How to Use up Your Tomato Powder
There are many ways to use up your tomato powder.
How to use:
- tomato paste (mix up some with water)
- Add to soups, chilis, or stews for enhanced flavor and thickness
- Thicken up tomato sauce
- Add to mixed veggies or pasta dishes
- Use sprinkled over some olive oil for a light pizza sauce
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Hi.. wondering if you remove the skin on your tomatoes when making salsa and what type of tomatoes do you recommend
I do not remove the skins. I always just use a mix of what I am growing. That usually involves some paste and mostly heirloom tomatoes. I have made it once with all Romas and found that it was too dry. It needed some more liquid so I like a mix best.