Quest for the Tastiest Tomatoes

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Posted by @pardalinum on
Avid gardeners everywhere love to talk about their favorite tomato varieties. But how do you know which tomatoes you would like the most, especially if you are a beginning gardener?

Everyone has his own idea of what constitutes a delicious tomato. Chances are you already know you don't like those flavorless store-bought tomatoes. For years I grew the proverbial Early Girl variety. It grew well, but unfortunately the flavor wasn't anything to brag about. I dreamed of those wonderful tomatoes I had picked in Grandma's garden many years ago. I decided to seek out what I considered to be the best heirloom, salad/slicing, saucing, and cherry type tomatoes.

Randomly selecting a few tomatoes at a time from seed catalogs didn't seem like a good way to get results in a timely manner. Fortunately, my garden club came along to help with a tomato tasting program. You may find local garden clubs sponsoring these events in the summer. Tomatoes grown by the club members are cut up into sample-size pieces. To avoid bias, the tests are blind, with each plate (i. e. variety) being identified only by a number. My garden club set up a numerical rating system of 1-4, with four being the highest in the categories of flavor, texture, and appearance (color). For the first year I focused on the tomatoes with the highest flavor scores to select my initial tomatoes to grow. Then I would find a few additional tomatoes of the same types to grow side by side and compare their flavors. At the end of each season I chose the variety that I liked best and challenged it again the following year with different varieties to try out.

Being a bit handicapped by lack of copious garden space, I searched for additional opportunities to, shall I say, “mooch” free tastes of tomatoes before deciding to try them in my garden. Our farmers' market turned out to be the perfect venue for tasting tomatoes during the summer season. Many vendors were happy to offer samples in hope of a sale. Several tomatoes that I tried at the market ended up in my comparison tests.

Farmers' markets in particular can be a good place to find a variety of tomato starts early in the spring. A vendor at the market in my town specializes in heirloom tomato starts as well as modern types of tomatoes. I chatted quite a while with this vendor in order to narrow my selections down to just two or three heirlooms. To be more specific, I was looking for a couple of challengers to potato-leaved Brandywine, a tomato that had held first place in my heirloom lineup for several seasons. I took up the vendor's suggestion to try Cuor di Bue, and it turned out to be a very tasty tomato, but it didn't beat out Brandywine.

Are you fortunate enough to live near a major seed producing company? If so, they just might have an "open house" or similar event that invites the public to visit and try out some samples. My garden club visited Territorial Seeds and we were free to "eat our way" through their test fields. The range of different flavors that so many different tomatoes can present was amazing!

In the end, I found some very good, yummy tomatoes to grow each year in my garden. My winners are: For saucing, Viva Italia. Its flavor makes it good for salads and just plain eating. For cherry tomatoes: Sweet Baby Girl. My grandkids eat them like candy, and as a bonus these tomatoes resist splitting! For slicing and salads: Big Beef. Actually, this one was suggested to me by a friend who wanted me to procure seeds and start some for him. Need I say what my favorite heirloom is? I swear I dream all winter of those Brandywines!


Saucing tomatoes:




Slicing tomatoes:




Cherry tomatoes:




Heirloom tomatoes:

 
Comments and Discussion
Thread Title Last Reply Replies
Rutgers University by NJBob Mar 2, 2014 11:43 PM 4
Yummy Article by Joannabanana Mar 2, 2014 8:56 AM 1

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