Fruit
Tomatoes
Two completely different jobs depending on the cut: four minutes whole, ten minutes halved and cooler.
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 — different time, different temperature, same ingredient.
Cooking pages
- Cherry tomatoes — Whole, four minutes at 200°C. Blistered, not cooked.
- Halved tomatoes — Ten minutes at 170°C — the lowest cooking temperature in the whole catalogue.
- Dried tomato slices — Six to eight hours at 60°C, with a published note about steaming them first.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.