Homegrown tomatoes

Walking the dogs past the little farmer’s market in our neighborhood today, we spotted a table full of funky-looking heirloom tomatoes.

Naturally, we bought a bunch and are planning to assemble a tasting menu for dinner tonight; we’ve got a loaf of good peasant bread, sweet butter and kosher salt, and we may not have anything else at all.

heirloom tomatoes scaled.jpg
Tomato porn.

These are some of the same cultivars that your grandfather might have sliced and enjoyed on a sandwich–Cherokee Purples, German Johnsons, Mortgage Lifters–before the botanists at the ag schools got hold of them and started concocting hybrids that could be picked green, “force-ripened” with chemical gases and would survive shipping and have a longer shelf life at the grocers.

heirloom tomatoes front view scaled.jpg
Front view.

These heirloom tomatoes look completely unlike grocery store red-softball tomatoes. They are butt-ugly, shaped strangely, and they all have only one thing in common:

They taste absolutely great.

Ain’t nothin’ in the world that I like better
Than bacon & lettuce & homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin’ out in the garden
Get you a ripe ‘un don’t get a hard ‘un

Plant ‘em in the spring eat ‘em in the summer
All winter without ‘em’s a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin’ & diggin’
Everytime I go out & pick me a big ‘un

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes

- Guy Clark

- Barry@enrevanche

Trackbacks & Pings

  1. Tomato Porn « Innocent Bystanders on 27 Aug 2006 at 10:01 pm

    […] For an authoritative opinion on tomatoes, you are encouraged to consult The Commissar at Politburo Diktat. […]

Comments

  1. commissar wrote:

    There is no comparison between home-grown tomatoes and those round, red, tomato-shaped objects sold in grocery stores.

    But since I am only familiar with fresh tomatoes (and corn and apples, which have a similar taste differential with their commercial imitators), I wonder if this difference applies to all produce.

  2. JimK wrote:

    I *loved* my garden…fresh basil, tomatoes, zucchini, green peppers, hot peppers, garlic and cucumbers. When my wife got sick, I let it go…but now that she’s on the mend, guess who’s growing next year?

    I’m going to grow heirlooms and romas and make the most amazing sauce the world has ever tasted.

  3. Ali Mentary wrote:

    Tovarich Kommissar,
    The taste difference applies to almost anything that grows in the sun, each time i go back to my home, less than 300 km from Tunis, (that is in italy ;) what were you thinking?) I can’t help making funny faces when i start again eating tasty things instead of cucumber-tasting younameit.

    Dasvidania.

    PS.: you should have a look onto how some people grow the stuff other people actually eat.

    http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm

    no occurrence of the word “taste” :D:D:D