The defining quality of a really good tomato is a balance of sweetness and acidity. To achieve this, a number of different factors come into play. The variety grown is critical. The justly famous tomatoes of southern Europe, such as the Sicilian Pachino, San Marzano and Cuor di Bue tomatoes or the French Marmande have taste built into their DNA, whereas more recently developed varieties, such as the revealingly named Moneymaker, were bred to meet different goals entirely: regular appearance and size, split-resistant skins, long shelf life. Sun and heat are also essential to grow tomatoes with really memorable flavours.
Some tomato buffs argue convincingly that home-grown tomatoes, which have reached maturity slowly, growing outdoors (or only lightly protected from the elements) in a sunny, sheltered spot on fertile soil, can give imports from sunnier countries a run for their money. Very few tomatoes are now grown that way in Britain so nearly all the home-grown tomatoes you buy will have been grown in glasshouses which are notorious for producing high-tech tomatoes that look the part but don’t taste it. The Germans have a word for them, ‘wasserbomben’ – literally water bombs – an ironic description of those pinkish, mushy fruits that we have all tasted. That said, the eating quality of glasshouse-grown tomatoes has improved immeasurably as growers have selected more intrinsically flavoursome varieties, allowed them to ripen longer and picked them when they are more mature.
When choosing fresh tomatoes, as a general rule, and whether home-grown or imported, small is beautiful. Large plum and beefsteak tomatoes often disappoint – although they can be quite good for cooking as opposed to eating raw – but small plum and cherry tomatoes usually have the best flavour. Two of the most consistent cherry varieties from a taste perspective are Gardener’s Delight and Sungold. Try to make a note of the name of the variety to build up your own mental checklist of which varieties pack a flavour and which are duffers.
Don’t get sidetracked by tricksy appearance. Tomatoes come in all shapes, sizes and hues: beefsteak, cherry, yellow, black, gold, plum, mini-plums, cocktail, pumpkin and heart-shaped. The only way you can tell if they taste any good is by trying them. Don’t automatically assume that pricier tomatoes with a ‘vine-ripened’ label will taste better. They might, but equally they might be from an inherently tasteless variety, or ripened in an artificially heated glasshouse, so cheaper, less upmarket tomatoes might outperform them on flavour and texture.
Whatever variety or size of tomatoes you have, and however unpromising they may look – wishy-washy pink or even slightly green – you can usually improve their taste, if not texture, by ripening them up at home. Don’t keep them in the fridge because this hampers their natural ripening. Instead, put them in a basket, or on an old brown paper bag, laid out in a single layer, then leave them in a warm, bright place to soften and redden. If you want to use them for a salad, leave them until they colour up nicely. But if you intend to cook with them, leave them until they are blushing red and slightly wrinkled, as this will only improve their flavour and give your recipe a deeper, richer tomato taste.
For many recipes, such as tomato sauce, tinned tomatoes, creamed tomato or passata from a pack or bottle, will often give superior results to fresh. This is because riper tomatoes will have been used to start with, and the tomato flavour has been concentrated by the heat of processing.
Things to do with tomatoes
• A Niçoise pan bagnat makes a brilliant summertime packed lunch. Several hours before you intend to eat it, open up and hollow out the centre of a crusty, but pliant white roll or section of baguette, fill well with sliced tomatoes, a little finely chopped sweet red onion, some tinned tuna and/or anchovies, basil leaves and/or chopped olives. Season it well with sea salt, pepper and olive oil. Wrap in foil and squash under a heavy weight, so that the centre will be moistly pulpy and full-flavoured when you bite into it.
• Halve tomatoes horizontally, sprinkle with a mixture of breadcrumbs, chopped herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano), sea salt, black pepper and olive oil, and bake until they are soft below and crunchy on top.
• Over-ripe tomatoes make a good salsa to serve with grilled meats. Just combine chopped tomatoes, a little finely chopped sweet red onion, a tiny amount of chopped garlic, sea salt, black pepper and olive oil. Vary your salsa by playing around with additions such as chopped capers, black olives, preserved lemon and any fresh herbs you have to hand.
• A liquidized Spanish gazpacho, made with squidgy-ripe red tomatoes, sweet onions, cucumber, red pepper, olive oil, sherry or red wine vinegar and water is ideal for a refreshing and healthy cold summertime soup, served with croutons fried in olive oil.
• Fry tomatoes, halved horizontally, in unsalted butter until browned on the cut side, stab the uncut side with a knife tip in a couple of places, then fry on this side. When the tomatoes are browned and soft, season with sea salt and black pepper, then pour in enough double cream or crème fraîche to deglaze the pan. Let the cream bubble up and turn golden, then serve.
• Put horizontally cut tomato halves in a bowl with enough olive oil to coat and shake around. Meanly sprinkle the cut sides with golden caster sugar and bake at your lowest oven setting for several hours until they have shrunk in size and darkened. Use these oven-dried tomatoes to make roasted tomato soup and sauce, or cover in extra virgin olive oil and keep in the fridge to use on top of bruschetta, or as a salad with crumbled ricotta or mozzarella.
Are tomatoes good for me?
Tomatoes are a good source of vitamins A, C and E and lycopene, which help combat cell damage that causes disease. Lycopene in particular, the red pigment in tomatoes, is thought to be protective against heart disease and several cancers. The riper your tomato, the more lycopene it will contain. Some vitamins are depleted when you cook tomatoes, especially vitamin C. But don’t be sniffy about using tinned tomatoes, tomato paste or passata as there is also some research that suggests that certain other nutrients, such as lycopene, may become more concentrated in these products and better absorbed when they have been cooked with oil, as in a typical home-made tomato sauce.
How are tomatoes grown?
You will still find tomatoes grown in soil outdoors in gardens and allotments in the UK, but commercial-scale tomato production in soil here is a thing of the past. Nowadays the tomatoes we eat are produced under polytunnels in warmer countries, or, more often in the UK, in glasshouses. These range in size from scaled-up versions of the traditional gardener’s greenhouse to massive glass and steel constructions that are the size of a large village.
The type of cultivation within these glasshouses varies. Some growers still plant the tomato vines in soil, but, increasingly, more growers use hydroponic systems where the tomato plants are planted in soil substitutes such as coconut fibre, rockwool (a bit like fibreglass), clay pebbles and perlite (volcanic glass granules), and fed a nutrient solution. This can produce many more tomatoes than growing in soil because water, nutrient and air is directed to the rootball, freeing the plant to use its energy for upper leaf, fruit, or flower development.
Growing tomatoes (and other crops such as peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and lettuce) has been revolutionized by these state-of-the-art technological growing methods, making it possible to produce warm-weather crops even in the depths of winter in sunless northern climes.
Are tomatoes a green choice?
Modern tomato production methods are mired in controversy. Back in 1996, Sainsbury’s introduced a tomato paste made from the US-grown genetically modified Flavr Savr tomato. It went down like a lead balloon with consumers and was withdrawn from sale in 1999. Currently, no GM tomatoes are grown or sold in the UK.
More recently, large commercial polytunnels, widely used in warmer countries, have been criticized for generating large amounts of unrecyclable polythene waste and discharging nitrates from fertilizers into local water courses.
Soil substitutes are a debate in themselves. In colder northern countries like ours, spent soil substitutes can create another pollution source. On the other hand, when tomatoes were cultivated on a large scale in soil, the soil had to be sterilized regularly with chemicals to prevent disease and pest build-up and treated regularly with herbicides against weeds. Soil substitutes make this unnecessary.
Advocates of glasshouses also argue that the covered, controlled environment of the glasshouse makes for greener growing methods. In many UK, Irish and Dutch glasshouses, bumble bees are used as pollinators and beneficial predator insects are used to keep pests at bay. Commercial UK tomato growers say that these techniques are making pesticides more or less redundant and cutting discharges of nitrate and phosphate fertilizers into the environment.
The biggest environmental debate around the indoor growing of tomatoes and other crops such as peppers and cucumbers concerns the heating of glasshouses. Without such heating, British glasshouses would produce tomatoes only from May until October. Heating extends that season from February until November. This helps the UK and Ireland compete with imports, which account for about three-quarters of all the tomatoes we eat.
But conventional heated glasshouses guzzle up fossil fuels, contributing to carbon emissions and the global ‘greenhouse effect’, so UK tomato growers are looking at combined heat and power projects, such as capturing heat from power stations, to cut that heavy carbon footprint.
Is it better to cut down on food miles and buy UK-grown or northern European tomatoes grown under glass with heat, or choose imported tomatoes that have travelled further but have been grown only with the heat and light of the sun? Brainy people spend hours attempting to calculate which option is best for the environment and no uncontroversial conclusion has yet emerged. In the absence of a definitive answer, there is an alternative common-sense solution. Gorge yourself on British tomatoes during the traditional British season when they taste best, then focus mainly on tinned tomatoes, passata or paste at other times.
GREEN TOMATO CHUTNEY
It is no coincidence that recipes for green tomato chutney feature in traditional British cookbooks. Tomatoes are not the easiest crop to grow in the UK or Ireland, the main problem being not enough sun to sweeten and ripen them, which is why we don’t have the wealth of tomato recipes you find in Spain, Italy and France or throughout the Middle East.
Britain and Ireland had no tradition of eating tomatoes until the nineteenth century when the availability of sheet glass made commercial indoor growing feasible and the first glasshouses opened in Kent and Essex. Although tomatoes have been grown in Britain since the sixteenth century they were originally cultivated for their ornamental leaves and considered poisonous. Not without reason since, as members of the nightshade family of plants (along with aubergines, potatoes and peppers), their leaves are indeed poisonous. Some advocates of a macrobiotic diet (which originated in Japan and is based on eating whole grains, fruit and vegetables) still recommend avoiding foods from this family, as they believe that the alkaloid toxins in them are bad for health.
Where and when should I buy tomatoes?
If we are aware of the seasons at all, we tend to think of tomatoes as a summer food, but home-grown tomatoes, if grown using the most natural methods, either outdoors or in an unheated glasshouse, are at their best in the early autumn. The peak is September, but you can still get slowly ripened tomatoes as late as October.
Another approach is to stock up on flavoursome autumnal tomatoes in September and preserve them. Bigger tomatoes can be halved, slowly dried in a very low oven, then packed in small bags and kept in the fridge for a month or longer, depending on how thoroughly dried they are, and they will be much more delicious than those you buy. Overripe tomatoes can be turned into concentrated tomato sauce and stored in the freezer. In late September and early October, lay out mature, end-of-season UK- and Ireland-grown tomatoes in a cold room and they will still eat well at Christmas.
Will tomatoes break the bank?
Unless you want to buy the most standard type of hydroponic, glasshouse-grown tomato, supermarket tomatoes can be scarily expensive. Rest assured that you will have to pay through the nose for any better-than-average tomato. Small tresses of ‘premium’ tomatoes on the vine, or ‘flavour-grown’ ones command eye-wateringly high prices but because they are sold in small amounts, and customers rarely check the kilo price, we don’t always notice. Almost invariably these boutique ranges of tomato are swathed in packaging, usually not recyclable, and this helps to obscure the fact that you are getting very little for your money. If you manage to find some delicious gems in among the upmarket tomato offerings, then look on them as an expensive treat, but don’t assume that they are worth the price tag and keep monitoring what you are getting to check that they are worth it. Canny shopping at market stalls and in greengrocers is a good idea. They often sell perfectly good but ordinary tomatoes by the punnet or bag, for much less than supermarkets.