let me start by saying that we will always grow tomatoes… no matter what! we are in love with freshly grown tomatoes! whether we’re pickling green ones or eating BOT sandwiches, we’ll certainly have tomatoes on the vine.
they are an amazing food: versatile, delicious, and if you pick the right variety, super duper nutritious.
our very favorite slicing tomato, one that i grew up eating and that we’ve recently realized also makes an excellent pasta sauce is the cherokee purple. supposedly the seeds from the cherokee were passed on from the cherokee tribe beginning before the 1900s, and have been grown ever since. this makes it an heirloom tomato, and it sure is great. dark purple/red in color with a green top when ripe, we consider it to be a very meaty, dense tomato that tastes less acidic than your average tomato. this taste profile makes it fantastic on a tomato sandwich, especially when the slices are thick. it’s also great in soups and sauces since the sweetness of the tomato really shines through.
the ripened base of a cherokee purple, champion of tomatoes!
the top of the cherokee purple (yes, it’s ripe… just cut around the very green spots). the brown lines are where the tomato burst open from all of the rain we got the last two days. you can see that the spots have healed over naturally.
we’re also growing two types of paste tomatoes, the san marzano and the black plum paste tomato. jason and i both feel that the black plum is the “cherokee purple” of paste tomatoes. colored much the same and similar in its less acidic flavor, it’s also super creamy. we were surprised by this, but i guess that’s what makes it a great paste tomato… being creamy instead of watery!
san marzano on the left, black plum on the right.
the san marzano is a bright red tomato that is also creamy. together, these two paste tomatoes give us the best of both worlds: the flavor of the black plum is superior but the san marzano seems to be more fruitful and grows larger tomatoes.
this tomato triad is an exciting combination for future soups and sauces. we’ve already frozen some mixed batches, with all three tomato types included. stay tuned for a farm food friday fresh tomato sauce recipe!
.:.