Fruit
Tomatoes
Two completely different jobs depending on the cut: brief and hot whole, longer and cooler halved.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A whole cherry tomato is a sealed bag of liquid behind a skin that resists heat until it splits, so the job is to blister the skin before it bursts. A halved tomato is an open cut face full of water and sugar, and the job is the opposite: drive off water slowly enough to concentrate the sugars without scorching the exposed flesh, which is why the published temperature drops by thirty degrees. Tomatoes also flood a small chamber with steam, which is worth knowing before putting them in alongside anything meant to be crisp.
Why the cut matters
Tomatoes are the clearest example in the catalogue of why form matters more than food. The same chart gives cherry tomatoes four minutes at 200°C and large halved tomatoes ten minutes at 170°C, naming no state for either — different time, different temperature, same ingredient.
Cooking pages
- Cherry tomatoes — One manufacturer prints four minutes at 200°C for whole cherry tomatoes. Blistered, not cooked.
- Halved tomatoes — One manufacturer prints ten minutes at 170°C for large halved tomatoes; another grills them for seven. Neither says fresh or frozen.
- Dried tomato slices — Fresh tomato in 3mm slices gets six to eight hours at 60°C in one manufacturer's chart, with a note about steaming them first.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.