Tomatoes that taste like the real thing

BTW - Hi, I'm new - glad to find this forum. Sorry if I'm repeating old posts, I tried a search but here goes.

Anybody know where to buy tomatoes that taste like the real thing? There was a trend for a year or so for grocery stores to sell "ugly" tomatoes (e.g. heirloom or beefsteaks) but it seems to have gone by the wayside.

I'm willing to drive a while and pay extra for something that tastes a little more like a garden tomato (I do grow my own and shop from Farmer's Markets in the summer; I'm just high and dry right now) Anybody seen heirlooms anywhere? Truthfully, I haven't checked the higher-end groceries as they're not my thing (Whole Paycheck Market, Trade Your Clothes, etc.) but I'd be willing to!

Fox & Obel usually carries 8-10 varieties of them when they're in season, but you you'll pay an arm and a leg (and some teeth and a torso and quite possibly your soul) for them. I bought a bunch a few months back to use for a chilled tomato soup for my future sister-in-law's bridal shower, and (stupidly) wasn't watching the price, so chilled tomato soup for eight ended up consuming about $50 worth of tomatoes. That said, it was absolutely fantastic, and I'm glad to have spent the money... but I'll be saving those for special occasions.



So as much as I adore F&O (and I do), I'd love to hear if anybody has any good, less painful sources. But here's the info anyway:

Fox & Obel
401 E. Illinois St.
Chicago, IL 60622
312-410-7301

Gorgeous photo, Dmnkly.

I think a lot of people would tell you that you basically should only buy tomatoes in season; that what it takes to have them the rest of the year is just not conducive to flavor as opposed to conducive to making handsome, unblemished red styrofoam balls for grocery store display.

But even in season I've had trouble finding really good tomatoes. I hit the farmer's markets a lot, and got good ones, but never great ones like my dad used to buy 20 lbs. at a time from a retired couple farming outside Wichita. There may be some nostalgia factoring into that memory, but still, I always expect more from a tomato than I quite get in this part of the country. Maybe this year I'm going to drive around the farm areas beyond the city and see if I can find that magical place.

Dmnkly wrote:So as much as I adore F&O (and I do), I'd love to hear if anybody has any good, less painful sources.

Dmnkly,

Was in F & O a few days ago, they had three, maybe four, types of tomatoes, none better than mediocre, even for Chicago winter.

Nice picture, good looking soup, recipe available?

Enjoy,
Gary

Mike G wrote:
But even in season I've had trouble finding really good tomatoes.

I agree, even the "vine ripe" ones taste, well, vile. Sometimes even at farmer's markets they're not so good, and organic are no different.

At any rate, this would be why I grow my own in the summer, but it does mean that we're eating tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for some months and are totally dry some others (*gardeners - Meineke's in Niles on Touhy now gets a huge selection of herilooms; much easier than growing from seed)

It used to be that you could get hydroponic tomatoes in winter that at least approximated the real thing at five times the price. Wish we had those.

Spectacular soup, by the way, Dmnkly! I love that, in theory, we have so many colors of tomatoes available now so you can do beautiful presentations like that. Next time I'm downtown I'll check it out.

Thanks, Mike & Gary!

Sadly, I have no recipe, and my memory is pretty lousy. I was attempting to recreate and play with an Alan Wong dish my fiancee and I had in Hawaii this past April. To the best of my recollection, the soups were comprised of the tomatoes, fresh chiles, garlic, ginger and probably just a touch of rice vinegar. The salad was chilled lobster, avodadoes, cantaloupe, red bell pepper and basil seasoned with a little lime juice, I think. What makes it is the tomato sorbet, which I also shamelessly stole from Wong. I just made it with fresh tomato puree and simple syrup, but the tomatoes were so perfect that it didn't need anything more. Sorry to say I don't remember it any better than that

Regarding the F&O tomatoes, I didn't state that clearly... I meant that when they're in season, they usually have 8-10 varieties of heirloom tomatoes hanging around, in addition to their normal complement of tomatoes. These are the three types I picked out for the soups and sorbet... can't remember the names, unfortunately, but I want to say one of the three was Costoluto Genovese:

The Whole Foods in Deerfield has some Mexican heirloom's for 4.99/lb, but they didnt look too hot so I didnt buy them. They looked to be good types, brandywine and striped german, but my guess is that they were picked green because their color was off. This winter I have been mostly buying the smaller, on the vine, hothouse tomatoes that come in the plastic containers. They are 4.99 for a 1 pound container at Dominicks, and 3.99 for an 18oz container at Sunset, and the sunset ones (cant remember the brand but it was something like sunkist!?!) were better. Even these are mediocre at best, but they are better than the alternatives this time of year.
-Will

Two things:

In my winter CSA from Farmer Vicki/Genesis Growers, we got a few hot house tomatoes. Local, organic, sustainable all those good things, but taste wise. Pretty yucky. I really just do not bother much with fresh tomatoes this time of year (in this part of the world).

Gourmet this month has an article about how a tomato grown in Florida, the ugly/ripe cannot be marketed because of the evil FTC (Florida Tomato Commission). The article reads nearly like a parody, but it is also sadly informative on why winter tomatoes suck.

HI,

In general I don't buy tomatoes off season. Occasionally I will succomb to cherry tomatoes, which are usually better than the larger non-vine ripened.

Next best are tomatoes I canned myself when I knew they were at their peak. It is not the same as a tomato in late August, but what is in January?

Regards.

I stock piled Cento San Marzano canned tomatoes in August-September.

Even the best CANNED tomatoes are only available in season!

It's tough, and winter is certainly time for canned tomatoes.

By the way, Cento puree is still pretty darn good, even though not quite as good as the San Marzano's, and Caputo's (and some other markets) generally has them year round.

Time for spaghetti and meatballs, chicken cacciatore, lasagna.....

Nancy

Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/healt ... ining&_r=0

By no means infallible, but a data point, and something to try: I now live near the Hyde Park Treasure Island. Can't say that I'm a big fan overall, and and as for prices, something about Hyde Park's geographic isolation seems to give it a micro-economy similar to the Weimar Republic. But, all that said, TI regularly gets in local-ish tomatoes in season from both Arkansas and Kentucky. When they do, the prices are usually good (like $1.99/lb), and the tomatoes a much closer to "real" than I've seen almost anywhere else outside a farmer's market. We now grow our own, so I'm not testing them as often as I used to, but I did have some surprisingly good fruit from them.

Over the decades, taste has drained out of supermarket tomatoes.
Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, thinks he can put it back in within a couple of years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/scie ... -ipad&_r=0