How do you get 2kg of tomatoes into a jam jar? it sounds like one of those terrible maths riddles you used to get at school. The answer is to use my recently completed Food Dehydrator /smoker – I must come up with a better name, any suggestions gratefully received.

Our picture shows the intricate precision machinery whirring into action overseen by a keen and attentive highly trained operative asleep in a hammock. I have made two videos, which will be posted on my you tube channel – heritagecraft soon. The first covers the manufacture of the device up to and including the first firing, the end result of which is smoke dried tomatoes, and will I suspect when posted be very popular.

The second video will probably be very niche, and shows how to make smoked tomato powder, in which if I am honest not a lot happens, there are no car chases, no nudity, no overhead tracking shots from a drone, just a short clip of smoke wafting past 2kgs of Tomato’s and them slowly shrivelling up before being transformed into a powder which barely fills the bottom of a jam jar. In the Old days when I used to light things for a living we used to have a customer who ran a web site featuring fully clothed ladies smoking, which gets phenomenal traffic, earning him thousands of pounds every month so I just need to give the video a sexy suggestive title and perhaps I can get a whole new section of society interested in cooking.

What The video will inevitably fail to convey is what an incredible ingredient this is. The picture shows the second batch of 2kgs of Roma tomato’s transformed into an extremely concentrated smoke infused powder. The faintest touch of it seems to transform anything. Today we had Tomato bread, so you would expect that, yesterday I added it to Rosti a grated fried potato cake if you haven’t tried it and it was magnificent, and  as soon as the weather improves we get to try my new Mobile Garden Pizza oven I have been making for a while. Smoked Tomato powder on pizza, now were talking.

I set off on this journey as I wanted to try and make my own smoked paprika, and this was the method I came up with in order to do it, for some time I have been growing Hungarian Peppers on my workshop window, and when there ready I shall look forward to the end result. In the meantime I can think of all kinds of fruit and veg I can concentrate, and powder. Like every Gardener I have a glut of courgettes, it will be interesting to try drying those, the apple harvest isn’t that far away and I can see a use for apple powder. Any Suggestions, mushroom powder perhaps, a tomato and pepper combination?

As my dear old dad used to say – Life is fraught with possibilities.