Comments on: Tomatoes and Tomatoes and Tomatoes: Sauce

By: Linda

Linda — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I grow lots of tomatoes, many colors and sizes and shapes, and when our first hard frosts appear in September (sometimes not till October) all of my tomatoes, mature and immature, are picked, put in single layers in whatever, and sit in my “sun room” (lots of sun) until they near maturity, usually the last ones are just before Christmas.

I still eat them (better than store-bought) and I make a great “sauce” with them. I roast the tomatoes (mixed varieties) in a 325 oven with some olive oil and several other options including balsamic vinegar, salt, garlic and onion. I roast them until the liquid is about half reduced. I let them cool and then puree them in my cuisinart. Then a put them in sterilized canning jars with the appropriate amount of lemon juice and put them in a boiling water bath. I have them until my tomatoes are producing again next summer.

As for the seeds, different varieties of tomatoes have different amounts of seeds. They also have thicker, tastier, sweeter, thinner, etc. skins. San Marzanos are my favorite but Green Zebras are so sweet…. And I use my sauce for pizza, for stews, for marinara or bolognese or whatever.

Canning rocks, and I have numerous county fair awards to verify that assertion.

By: mike pardus

mike pardus — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

The article makes a couple of statements that I find confusing, I’m not a botanist, but it seems to me that the seeds are not the same as the placental tissue surrounding the seeds. Placental material is supposed to be nutrient dense to feed the developing “fetus”, but the fetus is not the same thing as the placenta.

I’m guessing that the “gel” surrounding the seed is the placenta.

Try separating a single tomato seed from the rest of the pulp, place it in your mouth and suck on it to remove all of the external stuff, leave it in you mouth for a minute or two until the “tomato” taste has subsided, and then BITE down on the seed itself. What do you taste? I just did this – in mid post actually – and the answer is “not much”. Maybe slightly herbaceous/bitter, but not umami – not as I identify it, anyway.

I think about this stuff a lot, but I don’t know much about the real, physical science of the stuff. If Ive got this all wrong, or If anyone out there can correct me or steer me closer to the truth, let me know.

By: mike pardus

mike pardus — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I’m guessing that the “gel” surrounding the seed is the placenta.

By: mike pardus

mike pardus — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I like and use MSG, I put Nouc Mam in mac and cheese….I know umami in all of it’s uses and abuses. If the seeds in tomatoes are where the glutamates live, I want to talk to the person who did the research. Can you have too much umami? yes. Is that what I tasted in the cherry tomato sauce – not a chance.

BTW – has anyone else noticed that okra FLOWERS are far more appealing than their fruit? I like okra, but the flowers look like orchids – drop dead gorgeous. Ill post a pic to DelGrosso’s Blog.

By: Sarah S.

Sarah S. — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Chef Pardus-

I’m very interested to have a chef’s thinking on that research on tomatoes and umami. I’m just a home cook and a joyful eater, so there’s no way that I taste and analyze and think about food as well as you and Michael do. What you say makes me wonder if there’s something that the chemical analysis of tomatoes and umami misses out on –interaction with other ingredients? with the human mouth? with the force of chewing? something like that, anyway.

Regardless, I thought the article was intriguing, given the discussion here. And I’m really glad it caught your attention, too.

By: Kerry Nolan

Kerry Nolan — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Just to clarify – the recipe from the NYTimes Magazine for tomato marmalade dos not call for cherry tomatoes, but for small PLUM tomatoes. I agree, cherry tomaotes would make for way more work that I would be willing to put into a day’s canning – but plum tomatoes are totally workable.

By: Ted

Ted — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I;ve got GALLONS of cherry & yellow pear tomatoes..

wish I had planted more okra.

By: Sylvie

Sylvie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I have over 70 tomato plants: 2 cherries (sungold & supersweet 100 – the extra great for drying & freezing whole), yellow pear, 2 paste (Viva Italia & San Marzano), Early girl, Big Beef, Celebrity, German Tree, Flame (aka Hiibilly) and 4 unamed heirlooms that an old neighbor of mine bred.

So besides eating a lot of tomatoes in many many forms from sandwiches to salad to quick sauce to tart to soup to oven roasting, I’ve been preserving: juice, puree, sauce & paste, feezing & drying. And giving them away…I may not even plant tomatoes next year, since all of those should last quite a while (just kidding). I use some for my clients too, of course.

I may not plant hot peppers for a few years either! And that’s not kidding…

At least summer has been particularly hot here, so the canning sessions don’t feel like a Turkish bath!

By: maddux

maddux — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I’m so envious! We have the WORST tomatoes here in San Francisco, so disappointing that I’ve pretty much given up eating them. A really fabulous tomato is one of the things I miss the most about growing up in Philadelphia… Damn you all

By: jodycakes

jodycakes — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I love your ideas for braising in a tomato based sauce. Thank you for the ideas.
Can’t wait to hear about the Vita Mix!

By: Bob delGrosso

Bob delGrosso — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I agree with Pardus: cherry tomatoes have far too much seed mass relative to flesh to permit their use for sauce without removing the seeds. They also tend to have a lot more skin relative to flesh which can be dealt with by grinding in a blender but I would not bother with them for sauce unless I had to.

And peeling cherry tomatoes to make jam? Maybe a tweaker would find that a useful way to spend his time.

By: Sarah S.

Sarah S. — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

This debate over seeding/not seeing tomatoes for sauce is fascinating, and not only because I’ve got a second batch of 8 pounds of tomatoes on my kitchen counter waiting to be turned into sauce tonight. There’s been some recent research about where the taste–particularly the umami–of tomatoes is the most vivid. Apparently, it’s the seeds!

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/May/05050601.asp

I don’t know if this is true for all varieties of tomatoes, or if there’s a point beyond which more umami is too much umami, but it’s certainly interesting.

(And Dana McCauley, I’ll probably get well over 40 pounds of tomatoes from my 6 plants, in a year that’s not been particularly good for tomatoes.)

By: Bruce F

Bruce F — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I've had good results oven drying them.

By: YOD

YOD — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Bruce, thanks so much for that link. I’ll give it a try this weekend after picking up some romas at the farmers market.

By: luis

luis — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

The Vita Mix blender is very powerfull. Two horsepower motor.
It’s been a while since I made gazpacho. Be a shame not to make it this summer?. I will try it again soon. Anything that combines great veggies in a great tasting soup should be included in the monthly menu rotation.

By: luis

luis — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Love making sauces…any type. Pizza sauce is great fun to make. We can get down to the quality of each tomato and how they taste. For sure. But finding decent tasting cheese is another thing. The pasteurization or whatever process we use to produce our cheese just produces a very nasty tasting fatty cheese.

By: David

David — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I also enjoy tomatoes greatly when they are fresh and all by themselves with a bit of enhancement.
I kind of went off tomatoes as an ingredient – I was delighted years ago to find that there were plenty of Italian dishes that did not include them, that it was not a primary requisite for that cuisine.
I find they tend to take over both in colour and flavour, as well as tomato paste staining things.
The subtle flavours of herbs can definitely be bulldozed by canned tomatoes or tomato paste.

By: bob

bob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

We’ve been lucky for tomatoes this summer in Portland, Or. We’re growing San Marzanos for our first time, they’re just getting ready to pop. Excited to see how they taste without the Vesuvuas soil. We’re big on tomato jam here, as well as smoking them, and oven drying. And of course, just biting into them right off the vine.
It seems like a great year for sweet and hot peppers as well, so many new (old) seeds are available at market and in the restaurants. bob

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Instead of the tomato jam in the NY Times magazine, I suggest making the jam that appeared in Bittman’s column of the previous Wednesday. No peeling required and it was easy and worked beautifully with some grape tomatoes picked up at the farmer’s market although Bittman said plum tomatoes were preferable. I served with cornbread on Sunday and with grilled chicken last night. Yummy on both.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Two friends of ours came over on Saturday and we processed and canned 100 POUNDS of tomatoes. The yield was 24 quarts of sauce and 10 quarts of canned tomatoes, tho the latter separated and reduced a little more than I’d like; a few also didn’t seal, so we drained off the meat and baked them down to get about 20 oz of tomato paste. It’s grueling work, but so much worth the effort.

I’ll be posting about it this weekend — can’t think about tomatoes for another couple days.