For years now, it seems every tomato I’ve met has had a white or yellowish-white core in the middle of it that has the consistency of a raw potato. Didn’t tomatoes of old not have those? Is it because I’m in Texas now (instead of Ohio)? Even my efforts of growing my own on the patio haven’t helped. Is there a certain ‘breed’ of tomato anyone knows of that is just nice, ripe, juicy, tasty tomato through and through?
Nah, they’re all like that now. I also haven’t had a decent watermelon in years. Your best bet is to grow your own.
Yep. I don’t buy tomatoes any more. Mine should be ripe any day now, and I just got bacon for the BLTs.
First, I don’t buy tomatoes at the supermarket at all, except for grape/cherry tomatoes. Other than that, I only eat them in season and directly from growers at produce stands and farmer’s markets.
Second, if you’re growing your own (good for you!) look for heirloom varities. Skip the Better Boys and Big Boys and other hybrids. One that’s really common around here that I like a lot is Bradley; Brandywine is also common, and Cherokee Purple is making a strong showing.
A good source for seedlings is http://tastefulgarden.com/. Check 'em out next spring. I’ve ordered plants from them before and they are very good – big and strong and none the worse for being shipped. If you want to go the seed route, there’s http://www.seedsavers.org/
I find that store-bought Roma tomatoes usually taste pretty good, although maybe I’m a weirdo because supposedly Romas are a sauce tomato, not an eating tomato. I started growing my own, and though they are about half the size of store tomatoes, they are the most delicious and sweetest tomatoes ever.
Most store bought 'maters are picked early, forced to ripen with Ethylene gas, and refrigerated
Picked early: they’ve just started the color shift to red, most of them are orangish or pinkish, red tomatoes should be a deep, intense red
forced to ripen with Ethylene: that orangish-reddish color is due to the Ethylene exposure
Refrigerated: destroys the flavor balance of a vine-ripened tomato, turns it to a flavourless mush, fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes should NOT be refrigerated, they are a warm-weather crop anyway, no quicker way to kill a good tomato than to refrigerate it, unless of course you LIKE flavourless, mushy tomatoes…
go to a local farmer’s market, pick up some locally grown tomatoes, and never refrigerate them, even better, grow your own, they’re not that hard to grow
Marmande is a good French tomato rare in the shops because it is usually an irregular shape. The problem has been commercial specialisation on appearance, often at the expense of taste. Roma needs strong sun but it is better than most because it is less juicy and much more solid.
My 2 favorite things about farmer’s markets: tart Door County Cherries and delicious heirloom tomatoes. I always hit the cherry booth (even when the cherries aren’t in season, they sell tart cherry juice) and these guys that have the best heirloom tomatoes. I could eat their tomatoes with just a little salt all day…
Definitely Brandywines. Tastiest tomato on the planet, IMHO. We’ve got I think four Brandywines going right now, should be getting the first ones in the next few weeks. Not that I’m averse to other varieties; we’ve got the usual Early Girls, some Russian heirloom I’ve forgotten the name of but its orange/yellow inside and pretty good, those small yellow pear-shaped tomatoes (my son loves these), a couple of Mister Stripey’s, etc etc. We should all learn the benefits of embracing tomato diversity, it’s awesome.
And, yes: grocery store tomatoes are hopeless for the most part; I hate the green centers. However, salsa must be made regardless of the season, so we get Romas or similar and make do. But in summer it’s off to the farm stand, or even better, pick from the garden.
If you have limited growing space, maybe this approach might work for you. We’re trying it for the first time this year, there’s three hanging in our garden area, we’ll see how that turns out.
All the suggestions of names here are wonderful. I’ll be heading off on a trek to Central Market soon. Your link here didn’t show up on my computer, squeegee, but if it’s a Topsy Turvey, I tried that too this year for the first time. Yesterday when I started to water it, the plant did not accept the water for a few moments and then an awful squawking broke out. There had to be at least one bird in there and I might have drowned it! Scared the bejesus out of me and I won’t be touching it again–I’ve had several traumatic episodes with birds in my life. But I’ll look for tomatoes by name at the market from now on. Many thanks to all for your opinions and advice.
MizQ
I have 16 tomato plants in my garden, with tiny cherry and roma tomatoes being the only visible fruit (although there are lots of flowers!)
This is my first garden in 12 years, and I just don’t think you can have too many real tomatoes. I’m sure my coworkers will embrace my over-enthusiasm when I bring in the excess next month.
But until then, I have found that the “on-the-vine” tomatoes in the grocery store are the closest to real tomato taste you’ll get. If you pull one off the vine and smell it, you even get a real tomato aroma. These and cherry/grape tomatoes are the only thing that gets us through the winter, being the tomato junkies that we are.
Dutch farmers use the Dutch natural gas to heat HUGE expanses of greenhouses. Flowers and vegetables are grown there under ultra-high tech circumstances, and exported using Holland’s dense infrastructure of roads, railways, harbours and airport Schiphol. Our main export country is Germany. About a decade ago, German consumers started to rebel against the Dutch “Wasserbomben”, of “water bombs”. Tasteless, hard, mushy, pale orange-red identical tomatoes. As our tomato’s bad reputation threatened to taint all our produce’s reputation, Dutch farmers started to commercially grow better tasting tomatoes for the upper part of the market. So we still have cheap “water bombs” in our stores, but also carefully packaged organic “Tasty Tom” on-the-vine tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes and “flesh” tomatoes. And I gotta say, the “tasty Toms” are worth the money. They are still high tech, and available all year round, but they taste good.
OTOH, growing tomatoes outside in the Netherlands depends way too much on the weather.