Posted on 05/12/2017 1:55:20 AM PDT by vannrox
The mystery of why supermarket tomatoes smell delicious but taste watery and bland has been explained by scientists.
Tomatoes gain their flavour from a combination of sugars, acids and aromas, but a new study has examined exactly how different elements influence their taste.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Firm, good looking and tasteless. You hit the nail on the head.
These tomatoes have no taste because they have no smell.
Grocery store hybrids are engineered to withstand rough handling by customer, picking equipment, transportation, etc, etc.
Grocery store hybrids have a high flesh to juice ratio.
Heirloom tomatoes have a high juice to flesh ratio.
Drop and heirloom and you gotta eat it as it will turn to mush.
Grocery store hybrids are not the same as your typical homegrown variety such as your Better Boys.
I, too, am a hobby tomato grower.
During a typical growing season I plant some 50 heirlooms and 50 Better Boy hybrids.
The hybrids carry me into the fall season as most, not all, but most heirlooms are dead
from the bacteria in the soil before the end of the season.
Bland Tomato Mystery would be a good name for a grunge band.
This is covered in an interesting book called “The Dorito Effect”.
I think we’re being played. As a former farm boy, I say the reason tomatoes have no flavor is because super market tomatoes are no longer allowed time to RIPEN ON THE VINE. They are picked while green, and gassed with chemicals, which causes them to turn red, but they are still unripe. That is why they have no flavor; because the flavors were not given time to develop on the vine. Also, they are so hard they nearly “crunch” when you eat them. Ripe tomatoes do NOT crunch when you eat them. Same for cantalopes. I haven’t found a REAL luscious, succulent, swoon-over cantalope in 40 years.
The cold kills the flavor in the tomato. After it’s fully ripe, it can withstand the cold, but not before. When 8 buy them at the store, I don’t refrigerate them. I let them ripen on the counter. Then once ripe, they go into the fridge.
I bought some ‘organic’ bananas the other day and they were horrid for both texture and flavor. Furthermore, they were more expensive than their ordinary counterpart. They didn’t even ripen well on the counter though they appeared to be the perfect ripeness for my taste. They tasted starchy, bland, sticky..nasty. I won’t make that mistake again.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90135252
Salt Water Irrigation Yields Tasty Tomatoes
Ever since I first grew tomatoes at home, I have trouble buying store tomatoes at all. It’s like paying for juicy cardboard.
I pick up tomatoes in the store and smell them. Usually there is no smell. Tomatoes should smell like tomatoes. Just grow your own.
Wheat straw bales are most useful if a daily rain trend continues throughout the growing season—otherwise will require special efforts made toward drip irrigation to be practical. The bales will dry out if not watered at least twice daily, as any water not immediately absorbed drains quickly.
Perhaps useful as the growth support structure for hydroponics?
I plant Cherokee Purples in the garden and usually just put them in the ground and feed them once or twice with miracle-gro.
This year I prepared the plantings with some lime, epsom salt, rock dust, and cotton seed.
In one hole I put the above and two small fish I pulled out of the river.
Hopefully they’ll turn out better this year than previous years.
And Jersey peaches (and sweet corn) are good, too.
I posit that the driving force is not the consumer's desires but rather the goal of the seller to provide a good looking tomato.
I understand that the strain of tomato is entirely different from the ones we ate as kids, bred to be rugged and robust. It was not bred to taste good.
I was told by an old Italian lady to add calcium to the soil to prevent rot in the fruit. Anybody ever hear that? I amended the soil with eggshells. Don't know if that will work.
Good advice.
Engineered fruit = sh!t.
“Organic” is the biggest farce in food. It’s nothing more than yuppie-ism and snobbery, targeted toward people with more money than sense.
I figured if anyone know about proper cultivation of quality tomatoes, it would be an elderly Italian.
I got Romas going right now. Got them at Lowe’s.
I expect them to taste like cardboard.
Since our “captains of agriculture” won’t pay decent wages to pick fruit they engineer rock hard tough fruit that can be machine picked. The end result is faux fruit. Tasteless crap.
It is sad when canned tomatoes taste better then fresh ones.
They GMO these plants to increase shelf-life and pest resistance, but they don’t care to and couldn’t possibly dedicate the same resources to determine all of the side effects or the collateral damage that they do to the plants genome. They couldn’t even figure out how they changed a Tomato’s taste and that is something that affects sales. Do you really think they care if the nutrient profile is altered negatively or if there are as yet un-studied nocuous properties as a result? The same factory mentality of the food industry that replaced whole butter with triglyceride laden margarine and chemically expressed seed oils or taking plants with life giving vitality and turning them into bleached white flour and refined sugar to pack into boxed inert products is now producing industrial grade fruits and vegetables.
My father used to grow the most delicious tomatoes. The ones in stores are awful. Even those at farmer’s market are not as good s my father’s.
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