Tomatoes Solanum lycopersicum
Never refrigerate them. Cold shuts down the aroma compounds and they do not come back.
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In the kitchen
Under heat
Extended heat breaks down the cell walls and concentrates the sugars — a slow simmer is what turns raw tomato into sauce.
Against air
Cut tomatoes lose moisture and flavor fast at the exposed face; use them the same day you cut them.
In storage
Counter, stem-down, out of the fridge. Cold stops the ripening and turns the texture mealy.
At the shop
Smell the stem end — it should smell like a tomato. If it doesn't, the flavor inside will be flat no matter how ripe it looks.
Which variety, for what
- Beefsteak
- Large and meaty with fewer seeds — the standard slicing tomato.
- Roma / plum
- Dense and low in water — the right choice for sauce, since there's less liquid to cook off.
- Cherry
- High sugar concentration for their size — good roasted whole until they burst.
- Heirloom
- Uneven ripening and thinner skins — more flavor variation, less shelf life.
Beyond the kitchen
A LEGAL VEGETABLE
The US Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden (1893) that tomatoes are vegetables for tariff purposes, despite being botanically fruit. The case was about import duty, not botany, and the ruling stands.
EUROPE THOUGHT IT WAS POISON
Tomatoes are in the nightshade family and were grown as ornamentals in Europe for roughly two centuries before being widely eaten. Wealthy diners' pewter plates leached lead in the presence of acidic tomato, which produced real illness and reinforced the fear.
THE FLAVOUR THAT WAS BRED OUT
A mutation selected in the 1990s for uniform ripening — making tomatoes an even red for shipping — was found in 2012 to also disable a gene that produces sugars and aromatics. The trade was made deliberately, before anyone knew the cost.
REFRIGERATION RUINS THEM
Below about 12°C tomatoes stop producing the volatile compounds that make them smell of tomato, and the loss is largely irreversible. A tomato that has been in a fridge does not recover on the counter.
A longer history
Tomatoes were domesticated in the Americas, with the wild ancestor originating in the Andes and domestication occurring in Mesoamerica. The Aztecs cultivated them extensively — the word tomato comes through Spanish from the Nahuatl tomatl — and they were a routine part of Mesoamerican cooking long before 1492.
They reached Spain and Italy in the sixteenth century and were treated with deep suspicion for a very long time. Being visibly related to deadly nightshade did not help, and the lead-leaching problem with pewter tableware gave the fear a genuine basis. The first Italian recipe using tomatoes dates only to 1692, and their spread through Italian cooking was slow well into the nineteenth century.
The Neapolitan pizza and the tomato-based pasta sauce — now the most globally recognisable Italian foods — are therefore comparatively recent. Tomatoes are today the world's most widely grown fruit crop by volume, with China the largest producer, and processing tomatoes for paste, tinned tomatoes and sauce account for a very large share of that.
