You Say Tomato, I Say Heirloom

Spring/Summer/Fall are great times for someone who enjoys cooking seasonally. I’m especially fond of late summer because of a fruit we all know and love… the tomato of course! Growing up with parents who were avid gardeners, I was exposed to all sorts of seasonal local vegetables and fruit. When the tomatoes were finally ripening, this was a magical time. There is nothing else quite like a red and ripened tomato picked fresh from the vine. Just slice into a still-warm tomato, a dash of salt and grind of pepper produces the most delectable treat. Because of this, tomatoes were consumed every day in many ways during their season.

Now that I’m in the city with not even a small patch of land for a vegetable garden, I have to rely on the farmer’s market for local produce. The tomatoes sold in grocery stores just don’t cut it when I know there’s better out there. So off to Union Square I go to grab what I can of the green market’s offerings. In preparation for a dinner party thrown for my friend Boris who came to visit, I decided to pick up some heirloom tomatoes. Wandering around the market, I notice a big difference in price, with Long Island heirloom tomatoes tipping the scale at $3.50/lb and Jersey vine-ripened at only $2/lb. To put this in perspective, the tomatoes in my grocery are only 69 cents/lb but aren’t remotely close to the true tomato flavor I’ve become accustomed to.

What to do with these choices? Hmm, I know! I’ll have a taste-testing using my unsuspecting dinner guests. So I grabbed a few different heirlooms, a couple Jersey vine-ripened and headed home to make a fresh tomato vinaigrette salad. Could they tell the difference between LI heirloom and Jersey vine-ripened? Half of them guessed right. It was pretty tough, I have to hand it to Jersey because they grow a mean tomato. Everyone agreed that one of the heirlooms was by far the best tasting. It was a huge yellow and red tomato (see pic below) and it was also by far the prettiest. Perhaps this gives it an advantage as they say we eat with our eyes before our mouths. Another “pretty” tomato was red with yellow stripes but when it came to the taste-test, it lost every time. It was far too dry and seemed almost like a cross between a pepper and a tomato. Everyone agreed that although the Jersey tomato tasted good, the other two heirlooms won out with a fuller tomato flavor. Long live the tomato, wherever it may be grown!