Sometime in summer, tomato season sinks in. Your vines is weighed down with green fruit. There are all those tomato varieties in jars. You know which ones turn to a tasty reduction, thick as a paste, and which turn to something watery.
The distinction isn’t about flavor, it’s structural. Knowing what your fruits are actualy like puts you ahead on the practical side of things. How does it look? Size classes relates to flesh density. You can guess what happens when that piece of fruit hits heat, in a sauce or otherwise (chart above).
How to Choose the Right Tomato for Cooking
Roma tomatoes: Because all Roma tomatoes looks more or less alike, having that oblong shape, most folks assume they’re the same tomato. They aren’t. Variety by variety, there’s a difference in vine habit and maturity days. For example, some varieties such as Giulietta, ripen in fewer than 70 days, and bear on determinate bush plants (one big harvest). Others such as Amish Paste bears larger fruits with thick walls and take longer, but who cares? Canning benefit from thicker-walled fruit.
How to judge? You want something that retains its shape. If your canning has been met with more pulp than fruit, chances are the variety had more seeds than meat and had thin walls. Size-wise, a big Amish Paste is good for slow-cooking sauces that require body; a small roma would be better suited to use in things like salsa.
Know your usage: Choose carefully. The graphic divides the varieties by fresh eating versus processing. Do you intend to eat these fresh? Choose a slicer type such as a Sunrise Sauce tomato or a San Marzano, which has more sweetness and less acid that shows up best when eaten raw. Also look for thick to medium-fleshed fruits, meaning they hold together and don’t disintegrate on the plate.
Or do you want fruit for concentrating into paste or for drying, which requires really dense, low moisture fruit? That’s what you get with so-called sauce types, like Opalka or Martino’s Roma, whose interior is meaty and doesn’t shrink to leathery toughness when dried.
Match the tool to the task. Why would you hang a picture frame with a sledgehammer? So why use a fresh-eating tomato for robust paste?
Texture is impacted by growing conditions: The tips section emphasizes full sun and even watering. Poor flavor results from inconsistent watering (splitting occurs). The key is steady moisture; let your plant put its energy into producing fruit instead of coping with stress.
When to harvest is key. Pick it when ripe, once it’s a deep red color and yields slightly under finger pressure. Yanking straight downward on the stem will tear the vine, knocking down other fruits as well. The recommended method are to twist gently up the stem. To keep the flavor, don’t refrigerate; room temperature is best for storage. Refrigeration will alter texture and dull sugariness. You will have less waste. You get more flavor.
How do you know what fits? Measure your space and check the variety data. Select determinate (shorter season) varieties for early eating, and choose indeterminate (long season) ones for canning later. That way you’ve got ripe tomatoes early for snacks, plus plenty of paste tomatoes for fall canning.
It’s like having a map in your head, or a visual one here: A roadmap. It is a cheat sheet that converts the hard-to-read Latin words into a picture of what you’ll be harvesting. Once you ‘get’ the physics of the fruit, no more guesswork, just confident cooking. No more jars of blah-looking goop; your sauce will have real depth of flavor. Your garden will seem like a well-run restaurant kitchen. You know what you’re planting even before it goes in the ground.