The best way to preserve a crop from decaying is to dry it in the sun or shade. But if the crop is huge then you may need a machine to dry it.
In good olden days our grandparents used to preserve the turnip, cauliflowers and other such vegetables to use as and when required in all season. Nowadays even the green house vegetables and fruits are available in off seasons.
The Bagioni Technology of Italy has developed an automatic machine for sun drying the tomatoes to mix salt evenly. The Fresh Plaza reported that one of the most important phases in the drying of tomatoes is salting. It has always been done by hand, in a coarse way and without precise criteria, with the final quality not always living up to expectations.
From now on, salting can be carried out in a uniform and precise manner thanks to an automatic system dosing perfectly and without any operators in contact with the salt, perhaps working under high summer temperatures, for hours and hours. This results in superior quality not only in terms of drying, but also in the colour of the tomatoes.
"The machine is an evolution of what was already achieved a few years ago," says the designer and manufacturer Aurenzo Bagioni and it was born from a specific need of producers of dried tomatoes. The employees spend hours and hours with a sieve in their hands to spread the salt on the long tables on which the tomatoes are placed while drying.
"The problem with hand salting is that there is no uniformity. Salt can fall unevenly, with greater concentration in some parts and deficiencies in others. Operators must also protect themselves from salt itself, which, if in contact with the skin for many hours, can cause problems".
Bagioni said "For this reason, we have created a specific machine capable of distributing the salt in a completely homogeneous way, to obtain a final product of superior quality".
In principle, the tomatoes are dried for 40 days, from mid-July onwards. "Our machine is used to wet the product by spraying it with clean water and, immediately afterwards, the salt is distributed and adheres uniformly, thanks to the water sprayed. In this way, less salt is used and a better result is obtained, because the uniformity of the distribution keeps the colour of the raw material unchanged". The machine runs on batteries and is fully automatic.
