Last Friday I went on a double date with some friends and
saw 'Ugly Tomatoes' on the menu.
That's not a good marketing move, someone commented. And we didn't order
them. Awfully superficial of us, in hindsight.
But after doing some reading on ugly tomatoes this weekend, I wish we
had tried the dish, though now I have a good excuse to go back!
UGLY tomatoes are just that. They are ugly - from the grocery store and
marketing standpoint.
Ugly tomatoes are not the perfectly round, perfectly red specimens that
you can find in almost every grocery store. They are not smooth; they often
have fluting and they might have cracks. So long as the flutes and cracks
haven't allowed rotting, they are perfectly fine to eat. They are not bright
red all over; they have color variations, including flecking, zebraing, and
more. One more thing that they are not - and this is the most important point -
they are not tasteless.
To get those Christmas ornament-looking tomatoes - all red and glossy -
growers and farmers have been choosing seeds with a gene mutation that makes
their crop ripen uniformly. By changing the amount of chlorophyll in the
tomato, farmers have been able to breed for uniformly red and perfectly round
harvests. However, this gene doesn't just change the tomatoes' look—it also
alters the ripening process by reducing both sugar and the "tomato-y taste."
Yuck.
I realize that by buying my tomatoes at the farmers' markets and
through local farms' CSA boxes, I've been cooking and eating ugly tomatoes for
years. I have always gravitated to those oddball tomatoes - not because they
are ugly, but because they just taste better. But now I'm ready to shout it
from the rooftops: I choose ugly!
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| from zazzle.com |
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