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How to grow the tastiest tomatoes

by Lee Reich
| August 27, 2010 9:00 PM

Some people, many of them gardeners, believe that the secret to eating a delectable tomato is to grow it yourself. Second best, they say, is farm-fresh.

At the risk of committing horticultural sacrilege, I say "not so" in both cases.

Ripeness is, of course, important to great flavor - an unripe tomato tastes no better than cotton soaked in diluted lemon juice. But this time of year, ripe tomatoes are to be had everywhere: from backyards, roadsides, farm stands, even supermarkets!

And if truth be told, tomatoes picked slightly underripe can still ripen to perfection off the plant, as do bananas, avocados and pears. (Not every fruit ripens after picking. Underripe grapes, cherries or blackberries, for example, will soften and might even lose some acidity after picking, but this is different from true, flavorful ripening.)

The real secret to eating a delectable tomato is getting a variety that tastes great.

Select for flavor

There are hundreds and hundreds of tomato varieties around. Many have been selected or bred for commercial qualities such as high yield, good appearance or concentrated ripening. Other varieties are notable for their disease resistance or their earliness.

In contrast, a backyard gardener's first consideration in choosing a tomato variety might be flavor. Highly touted resistance to "VFN" is important, but only if verticillium disease, fusarium disease or nematodes - which "VFN" denotes - rear their heads in your or in neighbors' gardens.

Likewise, there's no need to shy away from a good-tasting variety that is low-yielding because, in the backyard, you can compensate by putting in a few extra plants.

And it's true that the convolutions that catface the fruits of the tomato variety Belgian Giant make the fruits ugly. But the rich flavor that Belgian Giant slices add to a sandwich more than compensates for this defect.

Recognizing a great-tasting tomato

As a sweeping generalization, so-called indeterminate tomato varieties taste best. These are varieties that form fruits along ever-elongating stems. With determinate varieties, fruits terminate a stem so that further growth is from side branches that, in turn, are terminated by fruits. Seed packets and nursery catalogs tell whether a variety is determinate or indeterminate.

The advantages of determinate varieties are earliness and concentrated ripening period. However, I'd rather wait longer for my first tomatoes than eat an insipid fresh Sub-Arctic Cherry or cooked Roma tomato. Indeterminate varieties taste better because they have a higher ratio of leaves to fruits.

"Indeterminate" is not the last word in great tomato varieties, however. Even among indeterminate tomatoes, there is the good, the bad and the ugly. Here, things become more a matter of taste.

Time to name names

A general consensus has singled out some varieties, such as Belgian Giant, Prudens Purple and Brandywine, as having excellent flavor.

These three are old varieties, but some upstarts also stand out for fine flavor. Sun Gold and Sun Cherry, for example, are two recently bred hybrid cherry tomatoes so flavorful that it's hard not to gobble them all up on the way from the garden to the kitchen.

Rich, flavorful canning tomatoes include San Marzano, Amish Paste, Anna Russian and Howard's German.

The way to sleuth out great-tasting tomatoes is to listen to others' opinions and taste many of them yourself. Now, when fresh tomatoes are abundant, is a good time for this sleuthing. Then, find out the names of varieties that you think have supreme flavor, and make a note to buy seeds or seedlings of them next year.

If you can't find out the name of the variety and it's not a hybrid, squeeze out some seeds, let them sit in water for a few days, then strain and dry them for planting next year.

Go outside, pick and bite into one of your Early Girl or Big Boy tomatoes, two varieties frequently sold as transplants. Do you think they have really great taste? Any home-grown tomato tastes good, but there's no reason not to grow the best.

Some sources for seeds of many varieties of tomatoes are Fedco (Fedcoseeds.com), Tomato Growers Supply Company (Tomatogrowers.com), Tomatofest (Tomatofest.com) and Totally Tomatoes (Totallytomato.com).