All About Tomatoes --- How to Buy, Store, & Use Tomatoes

Tomatoes are the poster vegetable - the cause célèbre, if you will - of seasonal and local eating. Finding tomatoes that taste like tomatoes may be the biggest single draw to farmers markets around the country. See here how to choose and use these summer gems.

The Best Tomatoes

Photo © Molly Watson

For all the hoopla around "heirloom" tomatoes, I fear people sometimes lose sight of the most important indicators of a tasty tomato. The best tomatoes tend to be:

1. Dry-farmed, which means the tomato plants aren't watered after their flowers set, forcing the plants to work a bit harder to make the tomatoes and leading to better, deeper flavor.
2. Vine-ripened, that is, the tomatoes were allowed to ripen on the vine before they were picked (not simply left on the vine when brought to the store).
3. Locally grown, because tomatoes grown as outlined above are delicate creatures not up for long voyages.

Tomato Varieties

Photo © Molly Watson

Gone are the days when tomatoes were necessarily red and beefsteak (although I'd never refuse a well-grown, perfectly ripe sliced beefsteak tomato sprinkled with salt!). Find your favorite variety of tomato with these guides.

• Tomato Varieties by Color
• Heirloom Tomatoes
• Hybrid Tomatoes

Tips for Buying Tomatoes

Photo © Molly Watson

How often have we all bought perfect looking tomatoes at the store only to bite into flavorless mush? Once is one time too often, quite frankly. While I can't guarantee these tips will forever save you from such a fate, they should keep such incidences to a bare minimum.

• Look Don't worry about tomatoes with weird shapes. Even cracked skin is okay, but leaking juice and soft spots are not.
• Feel Choose tomatoes that feel heavy for their size.
• Smell Tomatoes should smell earthy and tomato-y, never musty or flat.
• Taste This is where farmers market shopping really pays off – you can often taste the tomatoes before you buy them.

How to Store Tomatoes

Treat tomatoes gently. Heirloom tomato varieties, in particular, tend to be quite fragile. So don't pile the tomatoes in a bag where their weight will squash one another, and always pluck vine-ripening tomatoes off their vines (or the vine stem off them) to avoid having the sharp vines poke holes in your precious cargo. But above all never refrigerate tomatoes. Temperatures under 50° turn tomatoes mushy and mealy.