Summer is an interesting time to be keeping up with this newsletter. On the one hand, the garden is overflowing (literally) with things to talk about — I have so many half baked ideas for uses of perilla / rau ram / marigold that I’ve been messing around with the last couple of months. On the other, the last place I want to be right now is indoors, hunched over a keyboard, being taunted by a blinking cursor.
The only thing that could lure me out of seasonal blogging hibernation is… the humble tomato. We have a friend who is teaching us all about tomatoes and vegetable gardening in general. Through her tutelage, and generous donation of spare seedlings, we‘re poised to have an even better tomato season in 2025. She is trying to hone in on which varieties to keep in the garden next year, and had the idea for a tomato tasting night which… is the most “me coded” event possible, I jumped at the chance to participate. Between our two gardens we had nine different tomatoes to taste and compare. Everyone’s ratings were a bit different, but a few notable ones floated to the top.
I don’t like ranking food prepared by humans, but contrary to popular belief, tomatoes do not have feelings, and cultivators can just blame my mediocre gardening skills. Photographs are shockingly sparse — if there is one thing to know about me, it’s that I never get the shot — but I’ll link out to some seed catalogs where you can see the mature fruit in all their glory. Without further adieu, the tomatoes of 2024:
1 - Japanese Black Trifele
Apparently not at all Japanese, these pear shaped fruit have one of the more complex flavors of the varieties we’ve grown. Slightly sweet and tangy, I almost get a grape wine type flavor from them; they eat considerably less acidic than some others. Although they have beautiful deep mahogany color when cut into, I don’t find the whole fruit to be especially handsome, which I suppose is a judging criterion. Overall these rich, meaty wonders were exceptional, and possessed a certain je ne sais quoi that had me bobbing my head in approval.
2 - Green Zebra
An absolutely beautiful variety, these are the most recent things to ripen in our garden. They don’t mature to red but a stripy yellow and green, hence the name. They kind of taste how they look — tart, acidic, slightly vegetal. By far the most contrast with the other varieties, a real lip smacker that will definitely find its way into the garden plan next year.
3 - Sungold
A classic hybrid tomato, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of them before. I’ve enjoyed snacking on these, baking them into focaccia, and making simple pasta sauces.
They’re almost impossibly sweet, I totally get why people go feral for these. I’m definitely seeing the value in having some early ripening / prolific plants to go alongside some of the slower growing heirloom varietals. These will definitely be coming back next year… going out to the garden and picking a handful of small tomatoes every day is far more satisfying than it makes sense to be.
4- Berkeley Tie Dye Pink
A farmers market staple, I think this is just a really good beefsteak tomato. We tried a few things in the same sort of family and this one rose to the top… although not as interesting or distinctive in flavor as my top three. Gorgeous green and red speckled skin, with a signature cross section look, it’s a tomato made for the magazine pages.
5 - Sunrise Bumblebee
Another stunner, visually. Not quite as bold as the Sungolds, they were soft with an especially chewy and flavorful skin. With such limited garden space, I’m not sure if these will make it into the beds next year, but I am quite intrigued by them.
6 - Black Cherry
These didn’t do it for me, they had a run of the mill grocery store grape tomato taste. Very pretty though, I can see the appeal for small tomato lovers. I think in general I tend to prefer slicers, with Sungolds proven to be the large exception.
7 - Cherokee Purple
I’ve been told the specimen we cut into was not the best representation of the tomato’s potential, but I can only speak to what I ate. Very similar to the Berkeley Tie Dye Pink, it was just a little less flavorful and of course not quite as pretty.
8 - Black Krim
The nicest thing I have to say about these is: fantastic texture. We have several more big ones still slowly ripening so perhaps it will grow on me, but again, similar to BTDP just not quite as good.
9 - Oregon Spring
The other hybrid tomato we tasted. A “tomato tasting tomato”, a good baseline to compare against.
Disqualified - Queen of the Night
A seed given to me as a gift, conceivably because of my black grinch heart and/or spooky disposition. I was very nervous about these seedlings as I started them way too early, and they were very leggy at first. Once transplanted, they really took off, and now I’m just waiting what seems like a very long time for them to ripen. Even without tasting them, I have to say they’ve been stunning to look at every step of the way, a purply black shade slowing overcoming the green the fruit initially set with. I really thought they would ripen in time for this event, but no such luck… they seem somewhat arrested at their current stage. One day, soon, I will finally taste their dark flesh.
You might remember my sandwich era from a few months ago. One of the recipes from the T&TW cookbook I was most excited to try was “The Tomato”, which features the curious addition of sunflower seeds. Absolutely delicious, on bread from Little T, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite bakeries in town for loaves of bread if not pastry. We remade them for tomato tasting night with the addition of bacon and chives.
That’s a wrap on tomato season. It was a really fun exercise to taste so many different kinds back-to-back, in isolation I’m sure my reaction would have largely been “yup… that’s a tomato”. I have a pretty clear sense of which varieties I want to try again next year, I think I’ll also re-introduce the Taxi tomato, which provided a small but delicious yield for us last summer.
I thought I learnt this lesson last year, but I was yet again woefully unprepared for the amount of garden space these plants require. I simply must add another raised bed next year; I deeply regret some yard layout decisions, but alas I will find a way to make it work. Also, we didn’t stake or trim aggressively or often enough, waited too long to cage — the mistakes are endless, really. The squirrels and/or raccoons didn’t seem to have a taste for any of these tomatoes the way they did last years Romas, so I suppose that is a small victory.
Yours in end of summer despair,
R