What is Ripe?

Some people, many of them gardeners, believe that the secret to eating a delectable tomato is to grow it yourself. Second best, they say, is farm-fresh. At the risk of committing horticultural sacrilege, I say “not so” in both cases.

Ripeness is, of course, important to great flavor. An unripe tomato tastes no better than cotton soaked in diluted lemon juice, to me at least. But this time of year, ripe tomatoes are to be had everywhere: from backyards, from roadsides, from farm stands, even from supermarkets! And if truth be told, tomatoes picked slightly underripe can still ripen to perfection off the plant, as do bananas, winter apples, avocados, and pears. 

All the above fruits — and tomato is indeed a botanical fruit — are so-called climacteric fruits. Like other fresh fruits they are alive and breathing, taking in oxygen and giving off carbon dioxide. But as climacteric fruits near ripening, their respiration rate dramatically increases. Final ripening is then quick, hurried further along by the ethylene gas the fruits naturally waft off. The ethylene stimulates more ripening which stimulates more ethylene which . . . it’s just like a nuclear chain reaction except safer. But one rotten apple really can spoil the barrel. (Rotting fruit gives off lots of ethylene and the barrel slows escape of the gas.)

Not every fruit ripens after being harvested or undergoes that histrionic ripening once it begins to ripen. Underripe plums, grapes, and cherries, for example, ripen slowly and if harvested before fully ripe will soften and might even lose some acidity. But this is different from true, flavorful ripening. They won’t achieve full flavor unless attached to the tree until ready for eating. Of course, when fully ripe they’re also soft, so commercially aren’t usually allowed to hang on branches to full ripeness. Fully ripe, they would ship poorly.

Diseases & Determination

So a fully colored tomato, whether pink, red, yellow, white, or black, is ripe. (Many years ago I grew white tomatoes; I would not recommend them.) The real secret to eating a delectable tomato is getting a variety that tastes great. There are hundreds and hundreds of tomato varieties. Many have been selected or bred for commercial qualities such as high yield, good appearance, or concentrated ripening. Other varieties are notable for their disease resistance or their earliness.

My first consideration in choosing a tomato variety is flavor. Highly touted resistance to “VFN” does not impress me because verticillium disease, fusarium disease, or nematodes, which “VFN” denotes, never rear their heads in my garden or many other gardens here in the Northeast. Likewise, I’ll generally not shy away from a good-tasting variety that is low-yielding because I can compensate by putting in a few extra plants. And it’s true that the convolutions that catface my Belgian Giant fruits make the fruits ugly. But the rich flavor Belgian Giant slices add to a sandwich more than compensates for this defect.

As a sweeping generalization, so-called indeterminate tomato varieties taste best. These are varieties, in contrast to so-called determinate ones, that form fruits along their ever-elongating stems. Seed packets and nursery catalogs denote whether a variety is determinate or indeterminate.

Fruiting habit of indeterminate tomatoes

  The advantages of determinate varieties — whose fruits terminate a stem so further growth is from side branches that, in turn, are terminated by fruits — are that they are bushy and early ripening within a narrow window of time. However, I’d rather wait longer for my first tomatoes than eat an insipid Sub-Arctic Cherry or Roma tomato. Indeterminate varieties taste better than determinate ones because they have a higher ratio of leaves to fruits.

“Indeterminate” is not the last word in great tomato varieties. Even among indeterminate tomatoes, there is the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here, however, things become more a matter of taste.

The Best (imho)

Still, a general consensus has singled out some great varieties, such as Belgian Giant, Prudens Purple, and Brandywine. These three are old varieties, but a number of upstarts also stand out for their fine flavor. For me, other hints that a tomato will taste good is if it has a heart shape and/or a pink color.

Some of my favorite tomato varieties

Sun Gold is a hybrid cherry tomato so flavorful that I find it difficult not to gobble them all up on the way from the garden to the kitchen. 

Rich, flavorful canning tomatoes include San Marzano, Blue Beech, Howard’s German, Amish Paste, and Anna Russian. The latter two varieties also have excellent fresh flavor and are good for drying. If I had to grow just one tomato, I’d grow one of those two. (They’re very similar, and I keep forgetting which one I’d grow.) Make that just two tomatoes; Sungold also.

Sungold tomato

The way to sleuth out great tasting tomatoes is to listen to the opinions of others and to try out many yourself. Now, when fresh tomatoes are abundant, is a good time for this sleuthing.

Go outside, pick, and take a bite into one of your Early Girl or Big Boy tomatoes, two varieties frequently sold as transplants. Do you think they have really great taste? Any home-grown tomato tastes good, but there’s no reason not to grow the best.