Looking for the best tomato variety in a particular category? As noted above, we designed a range of filters and built them into our tomato category listings to help make it easier for you to sort through the varieties to find the ones that match your unique methods, needs, and preferences. If you're just starting out and would like some direction, though, these are a few of our own favorites for flavor, sweetness, meatiness, disease resistance, and for making that simplest validation of summer-garden success, the tomato sandwich. Although the answers aren't quick ones, we hope you'll enjoy our recommendations.
A lot goes into the makeup of tomato flavor — in fact, one reason it's so difficult to breed better-tasting new varieties of tomatoes is because of the biochemical and genetic complexity of flavor. It is greater than the sum of its parts: a whole matrix of sugars and acids, plus over 400 different volatile compounds (at last count), all working in concert with more subjective qualities like "mouth feel" and visual appearance.
To add layers to that complexity, flavor can vary considerably by where the plant was grown, as well as how and when — factors that influence atmospheric, light, and mineral exposure. And while it's beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the tomato's organoleptic qualities (the taste and aroma properties of a food), it can be said that flavor will vary between plants in the same variety and even between fruits from the same plant. No wonder that flavor, like taste, is largely subjective.
Yet complexity never stopped anyone from playing favorites. For growers who love them, it may be one of the most beautiful things about tomatoes. For a trio of varieties celebrated for their rich, balanced flavor, try:
To many people's palates, the more sugary the tomato, the higher its likeability. It's not just Westeners who are sugar-crazy, though. In many traditional Chinese night markets, you can sit down to a plate piled high with fresh, thinly sliced tomatoes, heaped higher with sugar. Candy-coated cherry-tomato kebabs are a more recent, portable favorite in China, the nation where the most tomatoes are grown (by far, according to data from the Food & Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database).
Along with containing good amounts of the principal sugars fructose and glucose, tomatoes share another feature in common with many fruiting crops: an increased percentage of sugar will come at the price of smaller fruit. What that means is that most of the sweetest tomatoes are small tomatoes. Luckily, most people don't mind minimally smaller fruits, provided they taste good. The inverse relationship between sugar content and size is a truism in nature that holds well for some of our most popular sweet tomato varieties:
Schematic cross-section through a tomato fruit, showing 5 locules and the various surrounding tissues.
(Adapted from Thomas Rost, UC Davis, 1996.)
This is a good question, because nowadays it seems more the exception than the norm to see a tomato variety not being described as "meaty." Understandably, this can make it difficult for growers to figure out which ones are the meatiest. Measuring meatiness is not an exact science, either. Let's take a closer look at what it is that makes up a tomato's texture (hint… it's not meat).
Before we look at the anatomy of a tomato, it helps to define some terms. Botanically, the tomato is a fruit. Most tomato varieties produce fruits with either 4 or 5 seed cavities, known as locules, as shown in the schematic, or 2 locules, as with most cherry tomatoes.
The type of fruit that tomatoes produce is known as a classic berry, and its fleshiness — or meatiness — results from the tissue within known as the pericarp and the placental tissue surrounding the locules.
As the tomato berry ripens, it undergoes all kinds of metabolic changes influenced by genetics and environment both. Enzymes begin to digest the cell walls, softening the pulp, and the placental tissue around the ovules starts to become gelatinous. Once the fruit reaches maturity, it dehisces, or breaks away from its pedicel, or stem.
When you go to slice and bite into the tomato fruit, the texture you experience at that very moment is a reflection not only of the genetics particular to the variety and the individual plant's growing environment. It also relates to how much time has elapsed between the fruit's peak maturity — if it makes it that far — and consumption — plus everything that may have happened to it in the mean time.
To taste-testers, that textural quality is what is known as mouth feel. As in all things tomato, there is no shortage of opinions about what constitutes the best mouth feel, so establishing data points for "best meatiness" can be a tough call. But in more good news for tomato-tasters, inroads are being made in an obscure field known as acoustic tribology. In their bid to quantify mouth feel, researchers assert, strangely enough, that the way in which we perceive a food's texture relates to how the food sounds on our tongues. Or, as more aptly headlined by Smithsonian Magazine, To Measure the Taste of Food, Listen to Your Taste Buds.
Since that's more than mouthful on mouth feel, let's cut to where we would pin the ribbons for meatiest.
As the disease pressures you will face depend upon where you grow, so, too, will the answer to this question. From the macro down to the micro level, indoors, outdoors, and in-between, environment is one of the three prongs in the host-disease-environment triangle.
To help acquaint tomato growers with the most common disease-related issues, we compiled an overview of Common Tomato Pests, Diseases & Physiological Disorders. It also touches on a few of the developmental mishaps that can affect a tomato's appearance, texture, and flavor, which relate to environmental factors.
We encourage you to get familiar with the pest and disease pressures common or most likely to occur in your locale, and if they're of concern to you, to use the disease resistance filters on our tomato category pages and check the disease resistance codes for each tomato variety you consider. Choose with care and grow with care to reduce disease pressure in your crop.
With that in mind, here are a few tomato varieties that offer broad disease resistance packages.
Disease-Resistant Indeterminates
Disease-Resistant Determinates
For the Sandwich Sine Qua Non of tomatoes, we look once more to the beefsteaks. Here is a triad that truly makes the sandwich cut.
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