Slices of the variety Cosmonaut Volkov in late August. Edward Behr

2019 | Issue 104

Rich, Sweet Red Tomatoes

You Can’t Have Too Much Sun or a Too Great Variety

By Edward Behr

“It’s pretty unusual for someone who didn’t grow up in a greenhouse to do this and not fail,” Dave Chapman said, standing in one of his two Dutch-designed glass greenhouses. The tomato vines that filled them rose to almost twice his height. The two greenhouses together with a small poly-covered one occupy two and a half acres (one hectare) and constitute Long Wind Farm. The location is beside the Connecticut River in East Thetford, Vermont, about 15 minutes from Dartmouth College. Chapman didn’t come from a greenhouse background; he grew up on a dairy farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He started Long Wind Farm in 1984 as a market garden with a farmstand (his earliest efforts involved plowing with oxen). During the season, however, he was working 70 hours a week, and after his children were born, in order to have enough time to spend with them, he switched to raising greenhouse tomatoes. “We’ve worked with Dutch consultants for years and years,” he said. That education cost considerably more than college would have, if he had attended college. Usually, a farmer’s face is well-lined after years in the sun, but Chapman with his curly gray hair looks younger than his 66 years, as if the greenhouse environment had been kind to him. As a grower, he’s in full stride.

Dave Chapman is “absolutely our number one tomato guru,” Barbara Damrosch had told me, when I asked her what commercial tomato grower I should talk to. She’s a writer, horticulturist, and accomplished cook, and she owns Four Season Farm in Maine together with her husband, Eliot Coleman. He’s a legendary figure in the organic world who has been growing vegetables organically for 50 years. I might have thought Coleman was his own tomato guru, but Chapman has a single-minded focus.

David Chapman at Long Wind Farm. Kimberly Behr

In contrast to the tomatoes you may be growing in your backyard this summer, Chapman’s plants, trained to a single vine, live 14 months. They wind snakelike at the base of each long row, reaching a length of 35 to 40 feet (nine to 12 meters). On the day I visited, the ripest tomatoes had already been picked from the vines. The leafy part of each rises up biodegradable plastic twine that’s attached to a horizontal support wire. I watched a worker, high on a wheeled vehicle using heavy pipes as tracks, lower one vine at a time by perhaps eight inches, lengthening the snake on the ground. He moved the vine farther along its wire, supporting it with a new plastic clip beneath a strong leaf and another on the next flowers about to form fruit. The weekly harvest per vine, Chapman said, is the equivalent of 0.8 of a cluster of fruit.

Back in 1992, when I wrote a chapter about tomatoes, I spoke with breeders and other scientists, seed sellers, and growers, and I underlined the superior flavor of old varieties, which I’d begun to grow in my home garden just two seasons before. In the years that followed, so much was written about tomatoes that in 2012 when I was working on my book 50 Foods, I decided there was nothing more to be said, and I left tomatoes out. Now I realize that there’s newer, better information than I imagined. Some of my old ideas weren’t right, and I begin to feel I haven’t been serious about varieties at all.

Chapman has sampled more tomatoes than he can say. “Most taste terrible,” he said. The varieties he grows now were chosen first of all for their taste, he said, not for yield or other qualities. “We get paid for taste.” That’s his niche, along with being organic. (Behind the greenhouses are long mounds of decaying compost, a mix of hay and manure with hardwood bark, clay, soil, wood ash, peat, and gypsum.) The farm sells mixed packs of five small tomato varieties, the sweetest being the hybrid yellow Sunsugar, which I found almost eerily sweet. The small varieties “are more work in every way. They often have several clusters ripening at once.” There’s only one large variety, called Style, which was abandoned by its original Dutch seedhouse, after it was bought in a consolidation move by Monsanto, and is now maintained only by Long Wind Farm. Style is an F1 hybrid that Chapman aims to turn into an old-fashioned, open-pollinated variety.

Tomato flavor rests on a foundation of sugar and acid, with the gel around the seeds being much more acidic and the flesh containing much more of the flavor. Style, medium to medium-large in size, has a good basic tomato flavor, although it doesn’t have the lush richness I dream of in a high-summer tomato. But it’s superior to anything I can buy in conventional supermarkets where I live. (If you ever do a side-by-side tasting of tomatoes, it’s important to remember that the blossom end of a tomato, like most fruits, is much more delicious than the stem end, as well the first part to deteriorate.)

The temperature in one greenhouse, determined by fans and automatic controls, was 76 degrees F (24 degrees C), which, Chapman commented, was slightly warm. The ideal is a moving number that depends on light and humidity. “There’s an algorithm in the computer that figures it out,” he said. “All algorithms are imperfect but better than a person sitting at the window opening and closing it. We aim for a 24-hour average temperature of around 67 [19 degrees C].”

For heat, the farm is switching from propane to electricity from Vermont’s largest power company, whose energy is more than 60 percent renewable, per the state’s Department of Public Service, and claimed to be 90 percent carbon-free. (Wood pellets and other biomass fuels are renewable but not carbon-free.) The company plans to increase its purchases of wind and hydro and become 100 percent renewable by 2030.

The monoculture of Big Agriculture is often criticized, and I asked Chapman whether it was a concern to have two and a half acres of tomatoes all in one place. He acknowledged that the question was reasonable, but he commented, “It’s not a very big monoculture.” The total acreage of tomatoes in California, the largest US producing state, where the fields are vastly larger, is around 250,000 acres (100,000 hectares). Chapman could introduce other crops. “We could undersow the tomatoes,” he said. “But what happens to flavor, nutritional density?”

Long Wind picks by color. Riper, better-grown, fresher tomatoes, like other vegetables and fruits, are both tastier and more nutritious. Everything fits together. “We pick Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” Chapman said. “Monday morning is the reddest, because it’s the third day.”

During the one to three days before delivery, Long Wind keeps the fruit at 60 degrees F (16 degrees C). Storing tomatoes below about 55 degrees F (13 degrees C) reduces their flavor, and the more time a tomato spends below that temperature, the less flavorful it is. As tomatoes ripen, they’re constantly creating more aroma, while simultaneously losing some. In the cold the loss continues, but no new volatiles are created. (To make your own supermarket tomatoes: pick early, refrigerate, and wait.)

The farm’s tomatoes go out for delivery in four long white Sprinter vans, headed mostly to Whole Foods and other supermarkets around Boston, but to other New England stores as well, including co-ops, and to Wegman’s warehouse in Pennsylvania. The stores have their own tomato storage at 60 degrees F. As to keeping, Chapman said he had eaten a three-week-old Style, and it was good.

In my own garden, I pick tomatoes maximally ripe, which for most and probably all the best old varieties means soft enough to be easily damaged and as little as a day or two from the onset of decay. Varieties that vulnerable are not an option for a wholesaler and not easy for even the smallest grower selling directly, because of the high percentage of loss. Not to mention the lower yields and other shortcomings of heirlooms.

Working with the vines at Long Wind Farm. Kimberly Behr

To produce year-round, Chapman supplements the shorter days of the year with artificial light, but it’s not quite the same thing. “I think there is an increase in flavor in the spring as the days get longer,” he said. “Without artificial lights, the flavor plummets dramatically in November. With lights, they stay pretty good, but still not as good as May.” He continued, “There are other factors. High outside temps do not make great quality. Of course, poor fertility leads to poor nutrition. And relative humidity can affect flavor as well. Plus too much water. Too little water will make great flavor, unless they get blossom end rot, but will destroy yield.

“I know we can do better.” How? “So many ways. Every way! Better soil fertility. We are only getting started in understanding that. Better climate. Better watering. Better quality baby plants. Better control of the climate. Everything!

“You learn to think like a plant,” he continued, and he gave an example. “If the vents don’t work on a sunny day, it will quickly get too hot for the plants. Say it gets up to 93 Fahrenheit in the greenhouse. Once we realize that it is so hot, it would be a mistake to open the vents and quickly make it much cooler, even though that would feel much more comfortable to us. We need to slowly drop the temp down to the proper level, maybe over an hour.

“You can grow a great-tasting tomato outdoors in your backyard,” he said, seeming to refer to me. “You just can’t do it very long.” He mentioned a three-week season. The problem, he explained, is that compared with a greenhouse, your outdoor conditions probably aren’t those tomatoes prefer. As plants become stressed, disease and insect problems are more likely. “There’s too much water or too little, or too much sun, or too rapid warming in the morning,” leading to dew and wet leaves, which encourages fungal and bacterial diseases.

In most gardens, over the course of the summer the leaves of outdoor tomato plants gradually die from the bottom upward thanks to various diseases, and late blight can kill the plants fast. Those problems are commonly said to start or worsen when rain splashes soil onto the leaves. I once tried a hay mulch to prevent that, but the hay made a luxuriously damp home for slugs, which feasted on the lower fruits, and it didn’t reduce disease at all. Most commercial growers lay black plastic sheets or woven plastic fabric over the soil and cut holes in it to set plants. But I try to keep plastic out of my garden. I’ve considered setting plants in a living mulch of low white clover. Chapman thought that might be good for the plants. However, he said, “It’s not splash but climate.” He suggested erecting a hoophouse. “If you can get all the conditions right — soil, nutrition, water, climate — the plant will have a long life. That’s what we’re after, a fine stability.”

Afterward by email, I commented on the health of the plants I’d seen in the greenhouses, and Chapman responded, “I saw many problems where you saw perfect health. The plants are like people. As they get older, they are less resilient, but with a good diet and good exercise (climate), they can live to be old and productive. The plants in the taller greenhouse were a year old. When we fail, we get both disease and insects. We try to keep a biological diversity that creates a balance. A little disease, a few pests, no problems.”

 

No one knows how many distinct varieties of tomato exist in the world; estimates run as high as 10,000 and even 15,000. As I write, the tomato collection of the Plant Genetic Resources Unit of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service has 5,462 accessions. Some of those are varieties, but many accessions are a group of wild plants from a specific location, intended to capture the genetic diversity of the population there. Tomatoes can be from pea-size to as large as a small cabbage, or larger, if you get into novelties bred for size alone. The shape can be a smooth globe, lobed, or heavily ribbed; it can be spherical, flattened, oval, or like a pear, a bell pepper, or a fat carrot; some varieties have protruding tips. The range of color, familiar in many farmers’ markets, runs from conventional reds and oranges to pale yellow and white to what in tomatoes is known as “pink” (the skins lack color) as well as something so green-red-purplish that it’s called “black.” Some kinds remain green when ripe, and some have red-green psychedelic stripes.

Amy Goldman, in the Hudson Valley of New York, is one of the most dedicated North American vegetable gardeners and has been growing tomatoes for more than 35 years. She may have tasted as many tomato varieties as anyone. Altogether she herself has raised more than 1,000 varieties, and of those she culled 200 for her garden-inspiring 2008 book The Heirloom Tomato. The photographs by Victor Schrager show the full array of tomato beauty. That book led me back into the world of tomatoes.

In The Heirloom Tomato, for each variety, Goldman gives its size, weight, shape, outer and inner color, soluble solids in degrees Brix, flavor, texture, best uses, plant habit with leaf type and yield, maturity, meticulously researched origin, synonyms, and seed sources. All that information appears in such a neat column that you hardly realize how much is there. Besides, Goldman generally provides another paragraph or more with a story, something personal, or something about people. If you love tomato taste, you’ll zero in on the flavor ratings. From a few lows (“Poor; tasteless”) they rise to 53 varieties she considers “excellent,” including one that she calls “perfect” — Red Brandywine. That might be the acme of tomato flavor, but variables enter in. Every old variety of tomato results from someone caring enough to select it and save its seed, over and over. And what grows well and is delicious in my garden may not thrive and be delicious in yours.

Goldman is becoming something of a vegetable polymath. Besides the tomato book, she’s the author of The Melon, The Compleat Squash, and Heirloom Harvest; her completely new melon book is coming out in September, and she is at work on books on pumpkins and peppers. For a time, she was chair of the board of the Seed Savers Exchange.

“A Brix reading of at least 5 degrees is nearly always a prerequisite for good fruit quality,” Goldman writes. Degrees Brix is a measurement of soluble solids, which are mostly sugars. Goldman’s “excellent” varieties for flavor are nearly all 5 to 7 degrees Brix, with half a dozen currant to cherry sizes rising notably higher.

When I spoke with her in late May, she was working steadily in the greenhouse, getting ready to set out plants. In contrast to the rigor of her work, Goldman’s conversation was easy-going. Her aim in the tomato book, she told me, was to show the beauty, history, and diversity of tomatoes, so varieties with poor taste had a place. She promptly confirmed that 5 to 7 degrees Brix range for deliciousness. Who took all those Brix readings? “I did,” she said. “What other measuring person is going to do it? It’s easy. It really gives you an objective measure.” She added, “Sugar and flavor are almost synonymous in a lot of crops.”

She has some help with labor, she said, but “I don’t let anyone touch the plants but me.” She described brushing the young plants with her hand, to encourage them to become full rather than tall. She’s careful in everything. When she prunes away the leaves of each plant up to the first foot, she dips her pruners between cuts in bleach, to prevent spreading disease.

She continues to grow about 100 tomato varieties. “The most important thing is full sun. They do better on fertile soil rich in organic content. It’s been 30 years, and I’m always enriching the soil in one way or another.” She plants her tomatoes with a wide spacing of five by seven feet, for air circulation. “There’s really no one right way to grow tomatoes.” In speaking with her, I disparaged early varieties, but she was much more generous, saying, “I respect early tomatoes and the need to grow them where the season is short.”

I used to look for tomatoes with a distinct acidity, which can have a lightening effect in a tomato sauce, for instance, but lately I value most of all a strong, sweet aromatic ripeness even without full, balancing acidity. Goldman said she didn’t test tomato pH; for that, “I used my own sensitivity.” In her book, she praises the variety Ceylon as “Excellent, when cooked,” despite its “sour taste,” which raises the question of how much sugar and acidity, and in what proportion, really makes us happy in a tomato. There’s no definite answer, but we certainly prefer more sugar and acidity, and flavor — more intensity — at least up to a point. (You find a related aromatic intensity in the leaves, which aren’t poisonous, as they’re often thought to be; innovative chefs have been known to find a use for them.)

We think of a tomato as a vegetable, although it’s botanically a fruit and technically a berry. (As if to remind us, Goldman’s book includes a recipe for a tart that combines peaches and yellow tomatoes.) Yet what we usually think of as fruits are sweeter still. A fully ripe Comice pear might be 16 degrees Brix or higher. No tomato is that sugary, and if there were one presumably we wouldn’t like it.

Our cultivated tomatoes are nearly all Solanum lycopersicum. (Currant tomatoes, S. pimpinellifolium, are an exception.) The various tomato species are native to western South America from the coast to the high Andes and from central Ecuador through Peru to northern Chile plus the Galápagos Islands. Some of those places have moderate moisture, some are arid; they differ in soils and altitudes; and the tomato populations are often isolated in narrow valleys. The diverse conditions gave rise to diverse genetics.

Most if not all the genes governing large size are recessive, but tomatoes had already been selected for somewhat large size in the pre-Columbian gardens of Mexico and Central America. Those tomatoes were heavily ribbed, like the ones descended from them (by way of a side trip to Europe) that became popular in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. Then, starting about 1860, US growers and seed companies began to take the few varieties then in cultivation — firm rather than juicy, often with hollows — and select new, larger ones, always with a preference for a smooth shape. Bigger tomatoes give a higher yield per acre and take less labor to pick. The breeders also aimed at meatiness — juiciness together with a high proportion of flesh to seeds — qualities we associate with “beefsteaks,” which generally refers to a loose category rather than a particular variety.

Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Brandywine, which is among the beefsteaks, was introduced in 1889 by Johnson & Stokes and depicted in full color on the back of its catalog that year. The seeds, from unknown parents, had been sent by a customer two years before: “To our astonishment, it completely eclipsed, in great size and beauty, all other varieties we were testing, specimens when ripe weighing three to three and a quarter pounds each, as smooth as an apple and remarkably solid.” Almost as an afterthought, it was also described as “delicious.” But grand claims were also  made for other varieties, and two careful accounts of tomatoes in that period don’t mention Brandywine. Ponderosa, an even heavier beefsteak, was released by the seedsman Peter Henderson in 1892: “When we come to size, weight and solidity, no other Tomato begins to approach it.” Again it was called “delicious” almost as an afterthought. The new varieties of that time were as a rule chance seedlings, rarely intentional crosses.

After the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s genetic work in 1900, breeders became more scientific. Besides looking for size and yield and a smooth shape, they sought disease-resistance (although they certainly weren’t opposed to applying chemicals to fix problems). But they almost lost sight of flavor. By the late 20th century, that left a wide opening to be filled by the Seed Savers Exchange, other biodiversity-concerned organizations, and specialist seed houses. Heirloom tomatoes became a symbol of the deliciousness missing from so many modern vegetables.

 

The best tomato varieties, old or new, are nearly all indeterminate: they never stop growing. In my northern Vermont garden, the vines reach eight to ten feet before frost puts an end to them. You can easily switch the determinate-indeterminate gene back and forth, so you can compare determinate and indeterminate fruit of what is otherwise the same variety. It was Henry Munger of Cornell University in New York who first told me that. He was an important breeder of dozens of new varieties of melons, cucumbers, squash, onions, and tomatoes. He began teaching in 1942 and continued to work even after his nominal retirement in 1981 — I reached him at Cornell ten years later. (He died in 2010.) Munger’s tomato experiments half a century ago showed that indeterminate vines produce 25 percent more sugars than determinates of the same variety. Where determinates have only one to two leaves between flower clusters, indeterminates have three. More leaves put more solids into the fruit: more sugar and acid, more flavor compounds of all kinds.

Heirlooms are indeterminates perhaps without exception, and where most tomato varieties have leaves composed of jagged leaflets, certain varieties have larger, less deeply cut leaves that recall potato leaves. Like determinacy, the “potato-leaf” trait is recessive, rare to non-existent among determinates but characteristic of some heirlooms.

When I began to grow tomatoes in earnest, I lived in a cooler spot than I do now and the climate hadn’t begun to warm yet — the average frost-free growing season in my part of Vermont has increased by as much as four weeks. Among my successes were Persimmon (reputed to be 19th-century), Pink Brandywine (potato-leaf, then thought to be the original Brandywine, probably 19th-century), and Pruden’s Purple (potato-leaf, of unknown date and actually “pink”). But I was able to ripen only a few great tomatoes during that slender moment when summer heat persisted into the first week of September. Those tomatoes had wonderful high-note fruit aromas. My comparisons to memory may not be reliable, but it seems to me the tomatoes I grow now in greater warmth have fewer high notes and in their place deeper, more strongly aromatic flavors.

I’m not wedded to old varieties, although growing them helps to support genetic diversity and makes me feel closer to the essence of each vegetable. Heirlooms, not just of tomatoes but of all vegetables reproduced by seed, are open-pollinated, meaning they’re pollinated naturally by wind or bees. It used to be that the only way to create a new seed-grown variety was to select the desired plants and save their seed, replant them, select the best plants again and save their seed, over and over, until the plants more or less consistently displayed the traits you wanted. We now know that you have to take care not to let varieties cross-pollinate. (During flowering, the plants have to be protected inside fabric cages, or the individual flower clusters have to be protected, or you can plant the varieties far apart, up to 150 feet for older varieties, largely depending on their flower structure.) Open-pollinated varieties retain a lot of hidden genetic diversity, and if you continually save the seed of the best plants in your own garden, you get a variety better adapted to where you are.

Many 20th-century varieties came from breeders employed at the great land-grant universities, and their work immediately entered the public domain. Anyone was free to grow those and and other open-pollinated varieties and produce more seed or use them for further breeding. But during the last century, an increasing number of new varieties were more profitable F1 hybrids: first-generation crosses between two different open-pollinated varieties, crosses that must be remade each time more seed is needed. The breeder can keep the parents secret, and without that knowledge no one else can produce the variety, so a breeder or seed company can charge more for seed. Compared with open-pollinated varieties, F1s are genetically much narrower (each seed is approximately identical), and they benefit from the phenomenon of hybrid vigor.

Breeders employed by universities don’t profit personally from their open-pollinated varieties, but since 1970 it has been possible for a breeder, organization, or business to gain patent rights over a variety; for the next 20 years, it’s illegal for anyone else to save seed to replant, sell, give, or breed. Intellectual property laws are supposed to stimulate inquiry and innovation by offering a reward — protected rights for a limited time — in exchange for releasing that knowledge to the public, so afterward everyone can benefit and the way will be open to new achievements and discoveries. In the words of the US Constitution, the goal of copyrights and patents is: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” No one in 1787, however, contemplated granting rights over forms of life, and the ironical effect of plant patents is to slow progress in breeding. (Not to get into the details of US and international laws governing plant rights, but in the US there are also Plant Variety Protections, which don’t slow breeding because they exempt breeders from the limits on use.) In response to the current situation, some breeders in the US and other countries have taken the Open Seed Source Initiative Pledge to ensure that for particular varieties anyone will have the freedom to save seed, share, trade, grow, cross, and breed new lines and varieties.

 

But on the cool, slightly north-facing slope where I lived for years, no variety seemed special, and for a time I gave up growing tomatoes at all, apart from one or two plants of cherry tomatoes. Then I moved to a warmer location ten miles away. In 2012, I bought six plants of the open-pollinated red variety Cosmonaut Volkov, recommended by a subscriber. According to Tatiana Kouchnareva on the British Columbia website Tatiana’s TOMATObase, this variety was bred by Igor Mikhailovich Maslov in honor of his friend Vladislav Volkov, who was killed in the 1971 Soyuz 11 spaceship tragedy. The small-to-medium tomatoes produced the best cooked taste of any variety that I’ve grown. I now raise a dozen plants each year and can about 15 quarts of sauce — we run out, but that’s all I have patience to make. Cosmonaut Volkov is good in salad, too, although it doesn’t have the lush, juicy tenderness that many North Americans appreciate in beefsteaks, such as Red Brandywine or Pruden’s Purple. Cosmonaut Volkov is sometimes described as semideterminate; if so, that doesn’t prevent my vines from reaching seven to eight feet.

A cluster of fruits of Stupice, showing that it’s a potato-leaf variety.

I also regularly grow Stupice, a Czech variety from the 1940s, recommended by another subscriber. It ripens two to three weeks before Cosmonaut Volkov and has the best flavor by far of any early tomato I’ve grown. Even Stupice, as much as I like it, is in fact a little small and watery, and the plants are a little weak; after Volkov ripens, I lose interest. Recently, I learned about the small and similarly early Glacier, a potato-leaf variety introduced in 1985 and one of the rare tomatoes to come out of Sweden. Glacier’s fruits are quite small, but many gardeners say it tastes better than Stupice. A market gardener in my area, however, says that Glacier is not only small but hard, and she likes Oregon Spring much better.

Not every variety or tactic works in every garden, what with differences in climate (down to possible effects of windbreaks or valley fog) and in soils with their different contents of organic matter, minerals, pH, and ability to hold water. For instance, Purple Cherokee often gets raves for deliciousness, but when I grew it alongside Cosmonaut Volkov the fruits were acid and limited in flavor, raw or cooked. “Pretty terrible,” I wrote in my notes.

Red Brandywine, the variety Amy Goldman named as “perfect,” is not to be confused with the pink version, called Sudduth’s Brandywine, which also appears at the head of many lists and is distinguished by a potato leaf. Red Brandywine, Goldman wrote, is “high sugar, high acid”; it has soluble solids at “7½ degrees Brix, with readings up to 9 degrees.” That puts it in a special category for a large tomato. And yet among so many contenders, I hesitate to emphasize one “best,” when perfection is partly in the eye of the beholder and outstanding flavor may not be achieved in every location or year or consistently through the season. I’d studied Goldman’s tomato book more recently than she had, and when I mentioned to her that she had pointed to one variety as “perfect,” she wasn’t dead certain at first that it was Red Brandywine. Then she said, “It’s true, in a good year.”

Black Krim tomatoes at the Hollywood Farmers Market. David Karp

The fruit and sometimes vegetable specialist David Karp, who lives in southern California, pays close attention to flavor, and he said to me over the phone that his favorite tomato in farmers’ markets there is Black Krim, from Crimea. Keith Crotz, who lives in north-central Illinois, succeeded Goldman as chair of the Seed Savers Exchange, grew up on his family’s farm, and is a former market gardener and current dealer in rare horticultural books. I’ve been discussing vegetables with him on and off for years. He told me, “Our favorite here is either Black from Tula or Opalka.” The first is Russian and per Amy Goldman is merely “fair,” while the second per Goldman is probably Polish and is “excellent.” Crotz tends to express himself emphatically. He emailed me: “Terroir is more critical for Tomatoes than grapes!!!!”

This year, along with Cosmonaut Volkov and Stupice, I’m growing Black Cherry for the first time, and I’m again trying Pruden’s Purple, Sudduth’s Brandywine, and Matt’s Wild Cherry, which Goldman has at an impressive 11½ degrees Brix but was merely okay on my old chilly hillside. By the time I was rethinking varieties, it was too late to start Red Brandywine from seed and I didn’t come across plants of it at nurseries. It’s on my short list for next year along with Green Doctors, Yellow Brandywine, and the red Goldman’s Italian American. The last, with its tripartite name, honors the store Goldman’s father once ran in Brooklyn, and it came from seeds she saved from a Costoluto Genovese “look-alike found by me at a roadside grocery store” near Lake Como in northern Italy (it might have been grown far to the south). Its ribbed shape is particularly sensual, sagging like a full belly.

 

“Feed the soil, not the plant,” organic growers say. They address “the cause of problems by strengthening the plant through optimum growing conditions to prevent pests, rather than merely treating symptoms by trying to kill the pests that prey on weak plants,” in the words of Eliot Coleman. “More and more scientific evidence is available today on the mechanisms by which a biologically active fertile soil can create induced resistance in the crops.”

The 1990 law that established USDA organic certification assumed the importance of soil. A grower had to submit a plan with “provisions designed to foster soil fertility, primarily through the management of the organic content of the soil through proper tillage, crop rotation, and manuring.”

Dave Chapman is USDA-certified organic but deeply concerned that the standards have been  weakened. In addition to growing tomatoes, he’s executive director of the Real Organic Project, which was formed last year and insists on the importance of soil fertility and biological diversity, on raising animals humanely on pasture, and on sustainable systems in general. Real Organic believes that milk and eggs from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are being sold as certified organic because rules are insufficient or not enforced. (It may go without saying that CAFOs, widespread in the United States, keep animals in close confinement and are inherently cruel.) Chapman says, “Now ‘certified organic’ eggs are so cheap that they undermine any real organic egg in the wholesale markets.” Another large concern of Real Organic is that current rules allow hydroponic fruits and vegetables to be certified as organic, although their roots are in water and never in soil at all. If you buy “USDA organic” blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, other salad greens, or herbs, including basil, it’s more and more likely they’re hydroponic. But there’s no way for you to know that because there’s no requirement that they be labeled that way.

Organic hydroponic is cheaper and more profitable to do than organic soil, but plants raised in water according to a chemical recipe, even an “organic” recipe, aren’t as flavorful or good for you as soil-grown. “The soil growers just get pushed out,” Chapman says. Many of them convert to hydroponic. “Long Wind is a mature business, so we can survive and thrive,” he said, but a new soil-based organic wholesale grower can no longer succeed. Worse, the USDA has been allowing hydroponic growers to apply herbicide, specifically glyphosate, which is sold as “Roundup” and other names, to soil and immediately begin certified-organic production on the theory that the hydroponic plants are up in the air and not in contact with the poisoned soil.

Completely unexpectedly, in early June, Real Organic had a major victory: the USDA changed its mind. Hydroponic growers, like any soil grower, will have to wait three years after applying toxic chemicals to soil before they can become certified organic. Chapman believes the Real Organic Project made the difference. “Because we let people know it was happening. They couldn’t withstand the public scrutiny.”

“Real Organic Project was not created as an advocacy group to reform the USDA,” Chapman explains. “Perhaps that is why we were successful in this organizing effort. We were formed to create a viable add-on label that would represent real organic food to the eaters of America. Still, when we learned about the glyphosate spraying, we couldn’t ignore it.”

The Real Organic Project has created its own standards mandating soil-growing (with exceptions for fungi and watercress) and has its own “realorganic” certification, at no charge to farmers, thanks to donors. “Realorganic” is an addition to, not a replacement for the whole lengthy set of USDA regulations. Seventy farms signed on to be certified as “realorganic” in the first year, and Chapman hopes for another 400 this year. The aim is to get the project up and running. There isn’t even a logo yet for consumers to look for. Assuming the USDA doesn’t return to the original vision of what it means to be organic, then “realorganic” could become an important new stream of food in the wide space between industrial commodities, where the competition is on price, and the luxury high end, where the competition is, in theory, on quality.

Before USDA certification existed, Eliot Coleman had been farming organically for two decades, and after it was set up he declined to participate. When people ask him, “How do I know it’s organic?” he has always answered, “Know the first name of the grower.” If you do, you probably also know something about the person’s character and actions, but clearly knowing the producer will never be practical for most people. Four Season Farm’s website currently asserts that it is “NOT ‘USDA Certified Organic’ – I repeat – NOT.” The voice, caps, and bold, are clearly Coleman’s. “And for good reason. The USDA refuses to uphold the honest, old-time, carefully stewarded farming practices that organic has always represented. The USDA National Organic Program has been totally corrupted by the money, power, and influence of industrial food corporations.” Four Season Farm is “realorganic.” In a 2017 speech to Midwestern growers, Coleman said: “There are so many aspects of soil processes that we could not replace even if we wanted to, because we are still unaware of how it all works.”

 

Harry Klee, a public breeder at the University of Florida, works on melons, strawberries, lettuce, and especially tomatoes, and he is a co-author of studies such as “A Chemical Genetic Roadmap to Improved Tomato Flavor.” Dave Chapman mentioned him to me as someone he planned to talk to himself. Around 20 years ago, Klee and his colleagues, in response to the flavor shortcomings of so many commercial tomatoes, looked to the work of Munger and many others who had gone before them, and set about making a more definitive identification of the significant chemical sources of tomato deliciousness. They turned out to be not just sugar, acids, and volatile compounds, but the right compounds in the right combinations. Deliciousness occurred in a small number of heirlooms, while high yield occurred separately in varieties for commercial production. About 2010, Klee and his co-workers applied their knowledge and began the laborious breeding of delicious new open-pollinated varieties with much higher yields than heirlooms as well as with other attributes, including disease resistance. Klee said to me, “Ours are resistant to various Fusarium strains, and we’re about to release late blight resistance.” The first seeds were offered to gardeners in 2016. For a $10 donation, you get 15 seeds of each of three varieties.

I was confused at first by one thing I heard from Klee. I’ve always liked tomatoes with an old-fashioned beefsteak lusciousness, a giving texture North Americans tend to prize in thick raw slices, while Europeans tend to cook tomatoes that are so completely ripe. But at Klee’s consumer trials in Florida, tasters strongly disliked a very soft texture and preferred a firmer tomato. “Absolutely,” Klee said. “There are heirlooms that have a fabulous chemical profile but are soft and mushy. People hate them. We have the consumer panel data to prove it. Brandywine is a great example. Pick it at the exact moment of perfection and it’s fabulous. Let it sit on your kitchen counter for two days and it’ll turn to a disgusting pile of mush. That’s why our hybrids are actually in some cases even better than their heirloom parents.”

Reflecting on that, I think I would have agreed with the consumer panels. It’s only that I expect a great fully ripe tomato, like a great strawberry, for instance, to be short-lived. If a tomato spoils in a day or two, I blame myself for not having eaten or cooked it in time. (M.F.K. Fisher, retracing her steps in Provence in the 1970s, wrote in As They Were: “The fruits and vegetables of Aix were, as always, picked at dawn and meant to be eaten by nightfall. It was exciting once more to find myself racing decay.”) But for most people, it’s a reasonable hope that delicious fruit at its peak should remain there long enough that you don’t have to rush to enjoy it, and that’s what Klee has accomplished.

I interviewed him by email when he had just returned from a week of working and eating in Japan.

 

EB You seem to have synthesized all the information from the past and come up with the right answers for the present — why you?

HK It was a large investment in money and manpower. It’s a very integrated approach involving biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, and psychology. I think we were the only ones dumb enough to persist.

 

EB Do early varieties tend to be less flavorful because they have less time to concentrate solids in their fruit?

HK Not necessarily. The early large-fruited varieties, like Early Girl, just aren’t very good principally because they’re derived from modern commercial breeding programs. In fact, a lot of small-fruited early varieties are pretty tasty.

 

EB The most flavorful smaller-size varieties in Amy Goldman’s book all seem to be currants. Why is that?

HK We’ve tried many small ones that are not currants that are quite delicious. Cherry Roma, for example, is quite good, as is Maglia Rosa cherry. The red currant types are essentially wild-collected accessions. The tiny fruits are definitely higher in sugar contents. We have one called Red Currant that is fabulous, but we’ve tasted 50 or more wild accessions that would be considered currant type that are actually not at all good. What you see in that book is a small subset that have been chosen by gardeners over many decades.

 

EB When you evaluate cultivars do you measure degrees Brix?

HK We do, but sugar is only one part of flavor. Most modern commercial cultivars are relatively low. In fact modern commercial varieties are typically in the 3 to 4 degrees Brix range while heirlooms can be double. High sugar in general is inversely proportional to fruit size and to yield. So the modern tomatoes have been selected for high yield and inevitably lower Brix. Sugar is a big part of flavor, but think of it only as the foundation. You need sugar and acids, but volatiles are a major part of flavor. You can have a tomato that has good sugar but has low volatiles and tastes boring. You can do the experiment by putting a good tomato in the refrigerator for a few days. The volatiles will go way down but sugars and acids will remain essentially the same. You won’t like the outcome. We have shown that a subset of volatiles acts to enhance the perception of sugars. We can add these volatiles to a sugar-water solution and you will sense that it tastes sweeter than it actually is.

 

EB How many flavor compounds contribute significantly to tomato flavor?

HK We have identified roughly 25 volatiles, two sugars, and three acids.

 

EB Do more aroma compounds appear after a tomato is picked and continues to ripen off the vine?

HK If you don’t refrigerate it, it will continue to synthesize volatiles. But it won’t accumulate any more sugars, and in fact it will metabolize the remaining sugar over time to make all those other compounds.

 

EB Why not make a GMO tomato as opposed to an old-school, open-pollinated variety?

HK Cost. The regulatory system is such that it would be too big a financial investment to wend our way through the FDA and USDA regulatory processes.

 

EB How do you get a high-yield tomato to have as much flavor as a great heirloom?

HK We cross the very best-tasting heirlooms with a modern disease-resistant, high-yielding line. We have made hundreds of such hybrids. It frequently doesn’t work, but occasionally we get a perfect combination. We only release hybrids in which our consumer panel tells us that the flavor matches that of the heirloom parent and the yield far exceeds that of the heirloom parent. It’s a lot of trial and error, and we throw away a lot of hybrids. But when we get it right, it’s magical.

 

EB Can tomato leaves receive too much sun?

HK Our tomatoes are grown in 100 percent sun, dawn to dusk. The more the better.

 

EB: For flavor, is it better to have a little stress from limiting fertility or moisture?

HK In general, the same variety grown at the same time in a shade house, greenhouse, or open field will always taste better from the field. Part of that is light quality, but I think if you talk to any wine-grape grower, they will tell you that some stress is going to give you better flavor. I think the same is true for tomatoes. Stress is good.

 

EB Do your new Florida varieties grow well in other places?

HK Our heirloom hybrids are amazingly adaptable. Part of it is that Florida is a very stressful place to grow anything. Poor soil, extreme weather, too much rain, and disease pressure. If they do well in Florida, they probably are going to do well anywhere. We have sent our seeds to home gardeners in all 50 states and roughly 40 countries. We strongly encourage feedback, and overall we have gotten very positive feedback. About the only place where people have had consistent issues is the high plains — Idaho, Nevada, Arizona — where they have very short growing seasons. Those people usually tell me that Early Girl is about the only large-fruited variety they can push through in a season.

 

EB Your new varieties are for home gardeners. Would they also be appropriate for a small commercial grower selling at farmers’ markets?

HK Absolutely. We have an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania who grows hundreds for the New York City market. I’ve provided them to a bunch of small-scale growers around the US and Canada. In fact, if you can make money selling heirlooms, you can make more with our hybrids.

 

EB Is it true that rain splashing soil onto tomato leaves spreads disease?

HK It is for sure in Florida. But our soil is sandy, and the sand can splash up and actually wound the leaves, leading to pathogen entrance. Where you have real soil, it’s more just providing a humid environment for fungi to grow. But unless you want to use plastic mulch, there isn’t much you can do about it. It’s just the price of doing business.

 

EB One of your web pages says: “Producing a modern commercial tomato that can be shipped across the country in the dead of winter but has the taste of a backyard-grown heirloom is probably not going to happen.” Why?

HK Multiple reasons. First, large commercial growers demand high yield above all else. They are not paid for flavor; they’re paid for pounds of fruit. So the only way they will accept our varieties is if they yield 100 percent of the poundage of their current varieties. Second, wholesalers and retailers are not paying enough attention to handling and storage. I have seen many retailers routinely take tomatoes and store them in the cold for days or even weeks. Third, you just will never get the sugar up to where it needs to be without sacrificing yield. We can do a lot better with the volatiles and this will make a big improvement. But we’ll never get the sugar substantially higher without a yield penalty.

 

Naively, aiming at the highest possible leaf to fruit ratio, I once opposed all pruning of tomato plants, including of the suckers that appear at the base of each leaf, which you’re often told to remove. I grew my tomatoes, all indeterminates, in wide cages of old sheep fencing. To say the least, it’s not convenient to grow a plant that keeps requiring more and more space — it can’t be coincidence that tomato cages and trellises are almost never shown filled with mature indeterminate plants. The countless shoots of my plants stuck out of their cages like mad-scientist hair.

The chaos bothered me, but there were more significant problems. If I didn’t tuck in the branches as they grew, the weight of the fruit would often break a branch over a wire. So many leaves shaded other leaves that photosynthesis was reduced, and for that reason and lack of air circulation, the inner ones died. It was also hard to see and reach the fruits. The year that I first planted Cosmonaut Volkov, I switched to pruning each plant to two vines and tying each of those to its own seven-foot bamboo pole. The pruning and tying are tedious, but the problems are solved and the look is great. The plants outgrow the poles at about the time the season is done, which is excellent timing. I could put in tall, sturdy posts and use a low-labor commercial weave, in which twine is run horizontally in and out on either side of the growing plants, but that wouldn’t be as neat or as easy to prune. Now my leaves receive more sun, air moves easily and dries the leaves, and I don’t have multiple strong suckers that compete for sugar with each other and the main stem.

There is, however, another point of view on pruning. Klee said to me, “We do not routinely prune. Cutting the stem can occasionally lead to introduction of disease into the plant. You reduce it immensely with clean technique, but I think it’s better to tell the average home gardener to just leave the plant alone.” Clean technique includes dipping your pruners in bleach between cuts.

If you do decide to prune, determinates may only need to have the suckers below the first flowers snipped off. But my plants are indeterminates, and I practice what I’ve learned is called “Missouri pruning.” When a sucker appears, I let the first leaf remain and take only the growing tip. (In any case, you need enough leaves to shade the fruits somewhat; direct sun in high temperatures can cause sunscald — areas of dead cells that may rot.) Now and then I remove individual fruits because I’ve had trusses so heavy they break off and fall to the ground. You might think it would help to thin the fruit overall, so as to concentrate more goodness into fewer, tastier tomatoes, and apparently that works, but there’s a big sacrifice in yield and the problem of cracking skin can become worse. Breeders aim for resistance to cracking, but in a climate that fluctuates from dry to wet, cracking can be a serious problem when the fruit swells after a rain.

Really flavorful tomatoes, besides coming from a great variety, require absolutely full sun all day long. In a home garden, you do the best you can. My two rows have direct sun for almost the entire day and are oriented north-south for even light on both sides; the two plants at the south end receive the most sun and have the best fruit. This year I separated the rows by another foot to have more sun in the middle.

As my tomatoes ripen, more than judging by deep color, which isn’t easy in the dappled shade, I check for softness, testing with faint pressure from my fingers. Softness varies from variety to variety, but it’s quickly learned. Another sign of ripeness with some varieties is that when you lift and pull a fruit, it tends to break from the plant at the joint on the stem. But many indeterminates have to be clipped, which is the safest way. And some varieties are jointless.

There’s yet one more sign of ripeness, after you’re in the kitchen. You’re often told that, to peel a tomato, you should cut an X in the blossom end and dip it for half a minute in boiling water. That cooks and softens the flesh just under the skin, so the skin pulls off. But if a tomato is truly ripe, the skin will pull off without any boiling.

A tomato on the vine seems to be somewhat protected when temperatures get chilly, or at least it rebounds by filling up with more solids afterward. I hesitate ever to refrigerate tomatoes, but Amy Goldman told me that if you’re going to cook them, refrigeration does no harm at all. Harry Klee confirmed that, explaining boiling sends all those wonderful fresh volatiles into the air: “What I do — and highly recommend — is to save some fresh uncooked tomato purée to add at the end of cooking. This adds that fresh-tomato taste to a boiled-down concentrated purée.”

 

It’s hard to argue with the perfection of a sun-warmed tomato eaten with a sprinkling of salt while standing in the garden. Maybe our senses are more alert outdoors, so we taste better there. There’s also a time element. A scientist named Ron Buttery, who worked on tomato flavor in the 1980s and 90s, once told me that sliced tomatoes start to lose flavor almost immediately and half is gone after 20 minutes. I sometimes slice the fruit at the table. Salting helps to slow the loss.

In July and August, I never tire of a tomato salad at lunch. My ritual is to go into the garden and pick two or three. As much as I love simplicity, even a great tomato can be intensely flattered by the most aromatic shade-grown basil or the tenderest tips of dill. Other prime complements to fresh tomatoes — no secrets — include olive oil, black pepper, garlic, chives, great red-wine vinegar, and hard-cooked eggs (dill unites them with the tomato). I like the mild crunch of Oakleaf or Deer Tongue lettuce. Variety also comes from hyssop flowers or borage flowers, which you probably have only if you grow them. Fresh cheeses can be excellent: goat, sheep, cow — the pinnacle is Mozzarella di Bufala. Tomatoes, as much as almost anything we eat, go with other flavors and foods. Similarly, bread goes with almost everything, and the two together form a real synergy. The apotheosis is Catalan pa amb tomàquet — bread, optionally toasted and optionally rubbed with garlic, then rubbed on both sides with halved tomatoes, salted, and enriched with olive oil.

Another context of place comes from my interest in France. Tomatoes form the heart of salade niçoise, which occurs in debased form in so many restaurants in France that seeing the name may make you draw back. La Table d’un Provençal by the retired chef Guy Gedda [see AoE 55] presents Provençal cooking at the end of the 20th century, with an awareness of what went before. (In his two-Michelin-star restaurant, Gedda was a modernist, creating a cuisine around his region’s aromatic honeys.) For him, salade niçoise is composed of crudités (raw vegetables), the sole cooked item being eggs. “In the salade niçoise of our grandparents,” he writes, “tomatoes reigned in quantity, along with mesclun and white onions. The seasoning was olive oil… Anchovies did all the rest” — no vinegar. “Our grandmothers decorated the platter with black Niçoise olives and one or two eggs for the entire family. At a certain time of year, they added small, just-picked, local violet artichokes. In March and April, the fava beans arrived, later the bell pepper took over, and the cucumber with great shyness because it was and is little appreciated by the Provençaux.” To Gedda, it doesn’t suit salade niçoise: “It releases an acrid liquid that gives the other crudités an unpleasant aftertaste.”

The same salad, also in Nice, is enclosed in the round roll or other bread of pan bagnat, “bathed bread.” For an hour or more, the bread absorbs the liquid, trading some of the urgency of fresh tomato for a broader vegetable pleasure. The quasi-militant website of La Commune Libre du Pan-Bagnat names the permitted ingredients, starting with bread rubbed with garlic and largely overlapping Gedda (no cucumber but also no mesclun). “All these ingredients are of course from the pays niçois,” says La Commune Libre. “According to the season, your taste, and/or the market … ingredients may be removed from this list.” Then comes this warning in red: “In no case may any further ingredient be added to the Authentic Recipe for Pan Bagnat Niçois under pain of turning it into a vulgar Vegetable Sandwich.”

 

No smell is more delicious than that of a big pot of boiling tomatoes, according to my two sons. To me, as I cook and can a potful every few days in late summer, the smell begins to cloy with a slightly repulsive overripeness, like rolls made with too much yeast. As the season advances, the sweetness and richness change markedly, and the taste of the canned fruit reflects the date of harvest.

A couple of years ago, a dinner guest from France commented on my peak-season tomato gratin, saying that although he’d always believed the skins took away flavor, clearly in this case they didn’t. I think he also had in mind that leaving the skins was unrefined: to him it wasn’t done. Until that moment, I’d never thought of peeling tomatoes for a gratin. I leave the skins because it saves time, but also it gives the cooked slices some suggestion of shape, so they don’t entirely melt together. With tomatoes for a gratin or any purpose, the special care I take is to ruthlessly cut away and discard any part of the stem end that doesn’t look completely red and delicious. (For me, part of the pleasure of gardening is that I can be aggressively wasteful with what I grow, freely tossing things onto the compost heap.) For canning, after the tomatoes are cooked to a sauce and cooled, I run the liquid through my tomato press to remove the skins and seeds. I reboil it and seal it in jars. I don’t add anything, including basil; in commercial canned tomatoes, it often tastes too strong, one-dimensional, and slightly artificial.

When I buy canned tomatoes, I look for whole ones with the shortest ingredient list. Ones that are chopped or packed with purée have less flavor, maybe because they’ve been cooked longer or hotter than the whole kind. I try to avoid calcium chloride, which is added to firm the tomatoes, because I don’t like the fake texture and they don’t break down as quickly if you want them to. Tomatoes without salt give you the control of adding your own, and if you cook them down they don’t become too salty. You can look for genuine imported DOP “Pomodoro San Marzano dell’Agro Sarnese-Nocerino,” which never have calcium chloride, but beware that there are plenty of wannabes — look for the full name and the initials “DOP,” for Denominazione di Origine Protetta. And they’re not necessarily superior, except that canned tomatoes from Italy do have fewer yellow shoulders and are more carefully skinned than those from the US.

As you cook tomatoes, umami is heightened up to a point, although as tomatoes become really thick, the flavors become increasingly tired and off-putting. I like fresher flavors in a cold or hot tomato soup with little more than alliums, salt and pepper, a little cream, and an herb counterpoint. Cooked-tomato flavor easily takes over, although just a hint in a red-wine braise, a typical ragù bolognese, or chile con carne gives depth without tipping the balance. Tomato is the uniting factor in ratatouille (which made with insipid, watery zucchini can be awful). Ideally, the pieces — of onion, eggplant, zucchini, bell pepper, and (peeled) tomato — are cut small enough for easy eating but large enough to taste distinct. They’re cooked separately in sequence in one or two pans, the tomato being cooked last, to a purée; then everything is cooked together.

 

The greenhouses at Long Wind Farm. Kimberly Behr

The strong effects of variety, methods, and environment on tomato taste, and the effects of ripeness and freshness, are all linked to scale. Growers in the middle ground, such as Dave Chapman, can do well, thanks to varieties and methods. But there’s not much that breeders can do to improve the taste of large-scale commercial tomatoes, thanks to the facts of yield and sugar. The large conventional growers provide a consistent, convenient, low-priced supply under the supermarket’s wide roof. A really small-scale grower selling directly is a specialist in inconsistency: different things in different seasons, quantities that sell out, maybe nothing in winter. The offerings are more unusual — in ripeness and freshness (one hopes they were picked that day), in kind and variety, in reflecting local tastes, perhaps in vulnerability, often in deliciousness. A really small-scale grower may, of course, have great tomatoes.

Growing your own, the extreme of small and local, places no economic limits on your choice of variety and will always give maximum freshness and ripeness. When you’re about to prepare a meal, the first thing you do is  go into the garden. The best asparagus, cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, and raspberries are all picked not long before you eat them. (Lettuce, too, except that on sunny days you have to pick it in the morning or it may wilt before you serve it.) Tomatoes are different, because off the vine they continue to ripen, though not as well. But if you grow your own in full sun, no tomato you buy is likely to have quite as much aroma and sugar as the one you just picked. ●

From issue 104

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