I like gardening, but even I will admit that growing your own vegetables can be kinda pointless.
I mean, when you factor in your time and all your costs, you're probably not saving any
money, and it can be hard to grow something that's better than what you can buy at a really
good grocery store.
But there is one huge exception to that rule, and that is the tomato. Unless you've had
a great garden-grown tomato, I think it's very likely you've never experienced what
a tomato can truly be.
There are three big factors that tend to ruin commercially grown tomatoes: how they're bred,
when they're picked, and how they're handled. All three factors stem from the same core
problem, which is that tomatoes are not vegetables. They're berries. And like all berries, they're
crazy delicate when they're ripe.
A tomato can look fire-engine red on the vine, but that doesn't mean it's really ripe. Here's
how my dad taught me how to do it. He said when the tomato is really ready, it should
leap out into your hand. If you have to tug hard on them hard, they're not ready yet.
Really good berries, of all kinds, tend to be right on the edge of rotting, which is
why pick-your-own strawberries tend to be so much better.
Here look, here's two tomatoes of similar variety. Vine-ripened garden tomato is on
the right. They look similar on the outside, but look inside. The really ripe one almost
looks like it's bleeding, and the flavor and texture is far superior to the grocery store
tomato on the left.
A tomato this ripe can be a challenge to get from the garden to the kitchen without squishing
it, so it's no surprise that commercial growers pick their fruit way sooner, typically when
it's still mostly green. Tomatoes do continue to ripen off the vine, but they don't develop
the same flavor. The soil, the plant, the sun, the rain — they all continue to affect
the tomato's flavor as it ripens on the plant, in the garden, on the vine.
I think this is why even beautiful heirloom varieties that I've gotten at farmer's markets
still aren't as good as the things I grow myself in my garden. It's just commercial
suicide to try to bring a tomato to market that is leap-into-your-hand ripe.
But even when allowed to ripen on the vine, the big commercial tomato varieties still
have really inferior flavor. That's according to research done by Dr. Denise Tieman and
her colleagues at the University of Florida. There's a whole lab there dedicated to improving
the flavor of commercial tomato cultivars.
"They've been bred for many, many years now, for a lot of commercial traits, including
shelf-life and disease resistance. And all those things are important — we wouldn't
have tomatoes in the grocery store year-round if we didn't have all those things. But unfortunately,
in the process for breeding for all those traits, we've lost a lot of the flavor. And
it wasn't a conscious thing — it just happened."
And one reason why that may have happened is that the flavor compounds in tomatoes are
really complex. Dr. Tieman and friends have identified literally dozens of distinct compounds
that make tomatoes taste tomatoey. This is in contrast to, say, to the banana.
"For like banana, it's one compound. You can smell that compound."
This compound: Isoamyl acetate. You find the gene that makes that, and you can breed a
super banana-y banana. Tomatoes are way harder.
Certainly there is one simple thing that makes tomatoes taste good, and that is their natural
sugar content. But even that is lacking in the big commercial varieties. And by "big"
I mean big, literally. Growers like big fruit.
"That's another thing that we've found is that, yes, there is an inverse correlation
between size and sugar content. WE don't know exactly the basis for that, but that is the
case."
This is why if you're gonna buy fresh tomatoes from the grocery store, I think you're often
better off buying the little cherry or grape tomato varieties that come in plastic bins.
These tend to be a lot sweeter, and at least that's something.
But if you grow your own tomatoes, you don't have to grow the big commercial varieties.
You can grow the old varieties — what we call heirlooms, because they've been saved
by gardeners who passed the seeds from generation to generation, like family heirlooms. My favorite
is the Cherokee Purple. Look at that thing. In 1990, a gardener in Tennessee mailed a
packet of those seeds to heirloom tomato evangelist Craig LeHoullier, and now you can buy little
Cherokee Purple seedlings at any garden store.
But I can see why it's not a big grocery story variety. The plants only produce like three
or four fruits each. That's why I don't even have one to hold as a prop for you right now.
I ate them all. I'm hoping I'll get some more from these younger plants over here.
So when you grow your own tomatoes, you can grow the good ones, you can pick them when
they're actually ripe, and third and finally: You can avoid common handling mistakes, namely
refrigeration.
"That's the other problem. A lot of the tomatoes are chilled, and we've also done a study on
that. We've found that it actually changes the DNA when they're chilled. The DNA becomes
methylated, which shuts off the genes for a lot of the flavor compounds. And that can't
be reversed, once they've been chilled, and so you should never refrigerate your tomatoes."
That's no problem for me. Let me show you my favorite thing to eat in the entire world.
Some tomatoes from the back yard, still warm from the summer sun. Cut up a nice variety,
some red ones, some yellow ones, there's that Cherokee Purple again. That beefsteak tomato
looks awesome, but I think I'll save it for another day. Just throw them on a plate, drizzle
over some extra-virgin olive oil and grind on some pepper. I don't do salt. Mine always
seems to have sufficient natural salt inside them. Maybe that's just my soil. And if I'm
feeling crazy, I might tear on a little basil, but that is it. No cheese, no bread. Just
tomatoes. If this seems puzzling to you, I really think it may just be that you've been
deprived of truly great tomatoes your whole life, and for that you have my sympathies.
Even if you grow nothing else, try growing your own tomatoes. You can do it in pots.
I swear, it is worth it.