Of course the ones in that video are only used for canned sauces etc.
In the past two or so years, our local supermarket has started stocking “heirloom tomatoes” for chunks of the year (they don’t tell the variety, they just call them “heirlooms.”) They’re big and bulbous and irregularly-shaped, and they go bad quickly–but they’re very tasty. Since we have a lot of trouble growing our own tomatoes, I buy these pretty regularly.
Tomatoes, along with cantaloupes and peaches and a few other produce items, are best purchased by smell, not appearance. A nasty-looking tomato or peach can be a great buy if it smells awesome, whereas a perfect-looking one that doesn’t have an odor is going to be terrible.
Location matters. I have grown tomatoes in Indiana and south Georgia. No matter the variety, the southern maters were never as good as the northern ones. They were definitely better than the store-bought ones, however. Georgia mountain-grown ones are pretty good. I have read that tomatoes don’t ripen well when the nights are nearly as hot as the day, and that’s south Georgia weather.
OMFG the goddamn squirrels!!!
ETA: my husband has an ongoing battle with the squirrels, and finally understands why his grandfather used to set up ambushes with a bb gun. The most infuriating part, as you mentioned, is that they don’t finish what they steal, they just ruin it. They will sometimes nibble the unripe eggplants and peppers to see if they are ready and then abandon them to rot after being infected with their nasty squirrel cooties.
Sure, but what does that mean? My guess is that being bred for machine harvesting primarily means that they’re extremely determinate. Or in other words, every tomato on every plant in that field will ripen at the same exact rate. There’s probably a component of size involved as well- they want them to be uniformly sized I’m guessing. Those varieties are undoubtedly also bred for resistance to whatever diseases are common where they’re grown.
Beyond that, they clearly harvest them unripe, or else they’d disintegrate, regardless of variety.
So ultimately the upshot is that taste is probably fourth priority for large-scale commercial farmers, after determinacy, size and disease resistance.
And like samclem points out, they’re likely used for cooked applications, for which these tomatoes taste identical to the relatively unproductive and unpredictable heirloom varieties. Once you’re cooking them down, any delicate aroma and flavor compounds go away.
(I know; I’ve made tomato sauce from perfectly ripe home-grown heirloom varieties, and I’ve made it from store-bought 80 cent/lb “roma” tomatoes, and can’t tell the difference in the end product.
Raw… well, that’s a whole other story.
Heirloom recommendation. They’re hard to get though. I have one plant growing now.
I haven’t had a decent grocery store tomato in years.
I tore off the previous day’s page on my Old Farmer’s Almanac desk calendar, and was confronted with the story of the “Mortgage Lifter” tomato, bred in 1930 by M.C. Byles, a radiator repairman in Logan, WV. It was “so tasty that customers flocked to buy seedlings. In 6 years, he had enough money to pay his $6000 mortgage…” Hence the name.
If you Google “Mortgage Lifter tomato” you get lots of hits, like this:
http://www.burpee.com/vegetables/tomatoes/beefsteak/tomato-mortgage-lifter-prod000998.html
I’ve had mortgage lifters. They’re pretty good but VERY thin skinned. Even when bought at the farmers market you have to be really careful handling them.
I’m growing Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra and something called Brown Boar, which is a cross between Green Zebra and something else. I got the plants at the farmers market.
Ok. The takeaway: Grow some heirloom tomatoes and eat them when you pick them. Thanks, Dopers.
Our Mortgage Lifters are producing and we’re having them in sandwiches. Incredible tomato-y taste with a distinct smokiness (and hints of oak and tannins). They don’t seem particularly thin-skinned to me.
The Cherokee Purples are still slowly ripening.
Arizona person here. Whatever you home gardeners out here are growing that’s red and tomato-like, I don’t want it.
I am going to Cape Cod in a month or so. I will be haunting the farmers roadside stands for sun warmed REAL tomatoes.
Find and follow the TomatoMania fad and/or its local equivalent in your area (I think this link is to the SoCal variety: http://www.tomatomania.com/ ).
I’m figuring if the different types of tomato are coming from all around the country, then they should also be available via these little ‘conventions’ across the country as well. You’d just want to get to a sale on the right weekend and hunt around a bit. I’d think you could find a vine or three that will suit your tastes.
–G!
I generally have a black thumb.
Lately it’s been getting red-ish…