You Say Tomato...

WHAT’S AN HEIRLOOM TOMATO, ANYWAY?

Tomato time is here! Not so long ago, that didn’t mean much. With the advent of commercial-scale agriculture, tomatoes began to be cultivated year-round, indoors in greenhouses and oft en far from where they would be consumed. Picked barely ripe, and sometimes literally gassed to turn them red, most supermarket tomatoes were soft ball hard and almost completely lacking in flavor. Consumers came to accept that this was just the way things were.

In the mid- to late-1980s, this thankfully started to change. Pioneer organic farmers in Northern California like Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, the Barsotti-Barnes family of Capay Organic and Stuart Dixon of the now-shuttered Stonefree Farm, set out on a quest for a more flavorful tomato. They acquired heirloom tomato seeds from European seed houses and from seed savers exchanges and started planting what are these days familiar varieties such as Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Black Krim, Costoluto Genovese, San Marzano and dozens more.

Soon these farmers were producing tomatoes in shades of pink, orange, green, gold and even white. Some were large with multiple deep lobes; others small and perfectly shaped. All were selected for flavor. As they began to show up at farmers’ markets, specialty grocers and on restaurant menus, consumers began to rediscover and appreciate the taste of old-time tomatoes.

Still, heirloom tomatoes continued to be somewhat of a novelty. Indicative of that is a singular event, significant enough that it was covered by the New York Times, that took place in the summer of 2006, almost 20 years after the re-introduction of heirloom tomatoes to U.S. markets.

It began early on a Saturday evening at Capay Organic farm in Yolo County. There, Ann C. Noble, professor emerita at the University of California at Davis and creator of the Wine Aroma Wheel, conducted a sensory evaluation of select heirloom tomatoes, guiding more than 100 people through the evaluation and the search for descriptors, much as she had conducted hundreds of sensory evaluations of wines.

Capay’s Thaddeus Barsotti had had the idea of conducting a tomato tasting in the hopes of discovering ways to describe the attributes of his different tomatoes to his customers. That evening the descriptors elicited ranged from “acrylic paint on muslin”—a comment about Evergreen—to “ripe, like chocolate,” referring to Brandywine. The favorite of the night was Cherokee Purple, labeled as both “candy-like” and “smoky,” among other descriptors.

Vine-ripened, bursting-with-flavor seasonal tomatoes with attributes like smokiness and chocolatey-ness may seem commonplace these days, but we should all be reminded not to take them for granted as they haven’t really been around that long. Another reason to thank your farmer!