We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.
This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.
Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.
I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.
I've also had Californian dry-farmed early girls, and those are definitely the best tomatoes I've ever paid for.
That said, I think home-grown early girls or other small flavorful varieties are equally good even if you can't properly dry-farm them, so long as you can let them stay on the vine until fully ripe.
I have to go to work shortly, I'll try to update this if you check back.
My heat source is a Cadet Com-Pak 1500-Watt 120-Volt Fan Heater, suspended by metal angle irons in a cradle underneath the unit, intake filtered by a generic 12" air filter. I convinced myself that the wood never got hot because of the gap and airflow, but the auto shutoff in the heater itself was too sensitive for me to drive the dehydrator hard. I shorted its thermostat and added my own from Digikey. This allows me to aim for temps up to 145 F without the heater cutting out.
I regulate the temperature using a Ranco Electronic Temperature Control from a beer making supply company.
I regulate airflow using a AIRTITAN T8-N, CRAWL SPACE AND BASEMENT VENTILATOR FAN. Expensive but slick.
The dehydrator operates very effectively if one has outdoor barbecue experience. While I managed to weave the airflow tray to tray, one needs to tend the trays every few hours, and there can be front or back edge effects from a leaky airflow. This is nothing new to anyone comfortable with fires, but frustrating if one expects a perfect abstraction. Believe me, I've thought about redesigns with perfect air mixing, and they all double the size of the unit, which already looks like a washing machine.
The Italian grandmothers making estrattu on tables in the Sicilian sun have to worry about which tables first get afternoon shade. Nothing new here, the issues just take a different form.
This relates to your temperature measurement question. I choose middle locations for both thermostat probes, and I also have two TelTrue analog thermometers. Like BBQ, the idea of a single temperature is misleading. One flies this ship somehow, with better results than I know how to obtain any other way.
I've heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early, be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn't a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks.
Canned tomatoes don't have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn't the main factor in the US
You are correct. All the tomato's that arrive from the field nice and ripe get canned.
I exclusively buy Classico Sauce, because for the price of the sauce that you get, you also get an ATLAS Mason Jar... with oz markings as well in the glass...
So for sometimes, $2 you get a 16oz of all sorts of flavors of sauce, and a Mason jar to boot.
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Also, since this is HN - the Mason Jar was basically either invented by or perfected by the BALL brothers.
The BALL brothers evolved from inventing the mason jar to making some of the most sophisticated and, I believe, top secret components for a lot of stuff that winds up in orbit...
Edit: The Web isn't 100% conclusive on this (e.g., a /r/canning comment will seem to acknowledge generally-accepted wisdom that Classico jars cannot be used for canning, but then someone else will follow up with a comment saying it works for them). But Classico themselves have said that their jars are thinner than canning ones, and also have a coating that's a problem: https://old.reddit.com/r/Canning/comments/gjme5m/testing_out...
What I do use them for is drinking glasses, and I make custom leather sleeves for them and give them out as gifts.
I buy Bamboo or Copper lids for them for aesthetics, but I personally just use them to drink from, or to transfer soups/stews (my favorite things to make) to friends and neighbors.
I DO NOT belive they are safe for canning, as I had one shatter after going from hot to cold too quickly, so I do believe they are too thin to can in, sadly.
But I am curious about the coating - hadnt heard that - and need to look into it. Thanks for the heads-up
That being said some of the best canned tomato products are Italian.
The best American canned tomato is Stanislaus - only available to food service companies
That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.
I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.
The third option, would be garden fresh/farm delivered tomatoes - but they have a shelf like of about 3 days and can't handle transport - so the odds of seeing them outside of a farmers market (or your backyard garden) - are next to nil.
Maybe I've just only ever had inferior canned tomatoes, or the tomatoes I've grown have been particularly good.
That probably only works if you live in a country blessed with actual tomatoes. In Germany e.g. it's not easy to find tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.
Pasta made with fresh tomatoes is absolutely great and it is ridiculous to even think the opposite. The boiling is only done for some kind of tomatoes and it is done to peel it, heat does not make it lose any flavor.
… And that's why my grandma insisted on an all-day (and sometimes all-night) low temperature simmer for such sauces instead of trying to "boil the life out of it" as she used to put it. You can totally taste the difference though. There's a "richness" to a slow-simmered sauce you just don't get from a hurried boil or any sort of quick thickeners.
I'm fairly sure the quality of the ingredients will have a much bigger impact than temp.
That said, cooking on a low heat for as long as possible does give you the best results.
The majority of Italian tomato-based sauces call for canned tomatoes.
The key is a base of mushroom broth, with roasted garlic, and good tomatoes.
I don't disagree that a lot of home made sauces don't compare, but done right, traditional recipes are far better.
Don't repeat your thinking in Italy...
Better than any can sauce I've had
Searching just brings up a bunch of "pasta with mushrooms" dishes, or cream-based mushroom sauces without tomato.
No no no.
The massive resources and food scientists and labs are there to make an inexpensive and highly shelf-stable tomato-based sauce product. It doesn't matter how it tastes, Marketing will fix that, Graphics will do a lovely tomato-and-basil colour scheme for the jar label that evoke the little terraced tomato farms of Campania, and it'll fly off the shelves. Especially when they air the advert where Nonno and Nonna wink at each other across the table with a little sparkle in the air, implying that despite their advanced age they're still at it like knives. That stuff plays like crazy across all the demographics.
And you'll eat it anyway.