Sowing The Seeds Of A Tasty Tomato Revival

CBS News ^ | 1/14/08 | Staff

[T-Bird45]

The quest for the perfect tomato began in New Brunswick nearly 50 years ago and ended, for now, in a field south of Tel Aviv, Israel.

After eight years of taste tests from chefs and tomato lovers, agricultural scientists at Rutgers University say they have resurrected one of the most delicious Jersey tomatoes ever.

The elusive "Ramapo" tomato seed has been reproduced in Israel and 572,000 certified organic seeds were shipped this month to New Brunswick.

The Ramapo tomato, named after a New Jersey Indian tribe and developed at Rutgers in 1968, will be back for this summer's growing season after an absence of more 20 years.

In the Garden State, considered to produce some of the nation's best tomatoes, that's big news.

"People all across the land are frustrated with hard, cardboardy-tasting tomatoes," said Jack Rabin, associate director of the New Jersey agricultural experiment station at Rutgers. "Ramapo gives them something that's an alternative ... that captures that famous Jersey tomato taste."

Seed companies stopped producing the Ramapo decades ago because commercial farmers sought varieties that grew well in other regions, and the Ramapo did well mostly along the East Coast, Rabin said.

The first major release of more than 8,000 seed packets will be sold by Rutgers in a few weeks, initially to home gardeners like Edmund Ryan of Irasburg, Vt., who remembers first tasting the variety as a teenager from a neighbor in Red Bank.

"It was just the perfect Jersey tomato," said Ryan, 54, who recalled eating the tomatoes in a sandwich after football practice. "It's nice and tart and sweet but also just had a little extra that I can't explain."

Rutgers scientists have been busy pursuing that "holy grail" of productivity, good yield and taste in greenhouses and fields, experimenting with 154 varieties, with flavor as the most important characteristic.

Tomatoes have been an important crop in New Jersey for more than 100 years. Until the 1950s, many were grown for use in tomato products, including soup at the Campbell Soup Co., based in Camden, Rabin said.

After World War II, most of the large-scale commercial farms moved to warmer climates like Florida and California. What remains in New Jersey today are tomatoes for fresh use, at supermarkets, restaurants and farm stands.

In the 1960s, as transportation improved, breeders introduced new varieties to withstand the rigors of shipping from farm to supermarkets, often at the expense of flavor, Rabin said.

A new process also helped shipping: picking the tomatoes green and exposing them to ethylene gas to ripen and turn red to allow for longer transportation and shelf life, said Martha A. Mutschler, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell.

She said the problem in taste comes when the tomatoes are picked immature green, and they can't fully ripen.

"One reason tomatoes don't taste good is because they are picked too soon," she said. "Another reason is that people refrigerate them."

Of course, it's a matter of palate as well. Tomato lovers are passionate and often go without them during the winter, when in not season.

"The flavor is the most important thing, you know," said chef Andre Soltner, who sold his legendary New York restaurant, Lutece, and teaches at the French Culinary Institute in New York. "When I cannot get good tomatoes with flavor, I don't use them."

For Lucky Lee, co-owner of Lucky's Real Tomatoes in Brooklyn, N.Y., which trucks ripe tomatoes during the winter from Florida back to New York in a day's turnaround, good tomatoes are also a source of nostalgia.

"It reminds you of a different time, a more natural way of living before additives and chemicals were put in everything we eat to make it last longer," she said. "It's a simpler life, a nicer life."

This will be a big day for tomato lovers.

Paul Wigsten, Culinary Institute of AmericaThe Ramapo tomato has elicited that nostalgia on tomato message boards from gardeners clamoring for the seeds.

It will grow well in New Jersey, but in other Mid-Atlantic states too, said its developer, Bernard Pollack. He started working on it in 1960 and is now a retired professor of plant breeding and genetics living in California.

Because the variety is an "F-1" hybrid, gardeners cannot save the seeds and replant them, expecting to recapture the same Ramapo with sweet-acid flavor.

Instead, seeds must be pollinated by hand, usually by a seed company which does the labor-intensive work of crossing the two parent lines, Pollack said. The original "parents" were still at Rutgers.

The "Jersey Tomato working group" at Rutgers, made up of economists, breeders, horticulturists and plant pathologists and first convened in 2000, will present its findings about the Ramapo Tuesday in Atlantic City.

Once they decided to introduce the Ramapo, they found a seed company in Israel, which has a winter growing season, to replicate them at a good price, Rabin said. They will be distributed to home gardeners and later to some commercial farmers to test them.

"As word gets out about the particular Ramapo tomato, there's going to be a huge demand for it across the country," said Paul Wigsten, farm liaison and produce buyer for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Wigsten has never tasted a Ramapo, but has heard about the lore.

"This will be a big day for tomato lovers. It's real gratifying to see Rutgers concentrating more on flavor than on any other characteristic of the tomato," he said.

[mplsconservative]

Of course, there is only one kind of blue cheese, made in Newton IA. Nothing else comes close.

That would be Maytag, wouldn't it? I love to make Blue Satin Soup with it per one of Paul Prudhomme's cookbooks. Best soup ever.

I recall you're a former Minnesooootan. Hi to you from the frozen North!

[girlangler]

LOL. I lived on Table Rock Lake when I lived in the Ozarks. I found enough dirt there to grow them, but you are right, there are plenty of rocks in that area.

I live in Tennessee now, on the Cumberland Plateau. Lots of rock outcroppings. In fact, I have a garden, but have it all in raised beds, since the soil is so rocky here you can’t dig a hole. I compost and fill the beds with cow manure and garden soil. Still haven’t grown a tomato to equal what I grew in Missouri. Maybe it’s the seeds.

I have a cousin who lives on Lake of the Ozarks, and I fished there years ago. Great fishing!!! I hope to visit the cousin next summer and fish it again.

[capt. norm]

Yum. Of course, there is only one kind of blue cheese, made in Newton IA.

Nothing else comes close.

I'd love to have the brand name or some kind of handle where I could acquire some of that blue cheese.

I grew up in Iowa and back then Newton was known as the home of Maytag appliances and Fred Maytag was still alive (he just might still be alive and really ticked off at me for saying that).

I regularly order dill mustard from a small outfit in Denison, Iowa and each year I get a good-sized bag of popcorn (the big yellow kernel stuff) from Odebolt, Iowa (for non-Iowans, it's the home of the original "Cracker Jack")

as well as producing popcorn that is sold under a wide variety of trade names since 1889.

[RSmithOpt]

Yeah....winter commercial tomatoes, or even from the summer in the large chain grocery stores.....red, wet, sawdust...that’s about it.

[Eepsy]

My favourite tomato sandwich: Six inches of french baguette, split and spread with a good olive tapenade, then filled with alternating layers of lightly salted thick sliced tomato and thin sliced sweet onion piled as high as your mouth will open and sprinkled with best quality balsamic. It’s summer on bread.

[mupcat]

Asparagus? Icck.

Break or cut them at the tender part and roll them in a tiny bit of olive oil and kosher salt then roast them in a 400 degree oven for about 10-15 minutes (depending on how thick the stalk), and bet you'll change your mind. Really good with a sweet nutty flavor. In fact, IMO, almost all veggies taste better cooked this way.

[mplsconservative]

Norm, I believe it is called Maytag Blue, coincidentally. Eric can confirm that if it’s the cheese I’m thinking it is.

[kcvl]

Tomato, Super Sweet 100 Hybrid

http://tinyurl.com/yw5o5x

[girlangler]

Me too, can you send me that link (for the heirloom tomato seeds). . . please, pretty please?

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

My favorite tomatoes are cherry. I like them orange turning red and mostly tart. Last year was the first year that I threw away flourishing tomato plants because they were ewwww, so very sweet. Blech. I feel like I sinned.

Here in Texas, I’ve had all these webs and caterpillars chomping on everything, too. Thinking about it now is quite distressing. i just have to get it right this summer!

[Billthedrill]

Hoo yeah! When I was very young we'd eat tomatoes that way, just like apples. Messy, gooey, and fun!

Now, about "home-growed" garlic...one of my colleagues is a truly expert garlic gardener. There's a weekly Farmer's Market hereabouts during the summer and a small bakery nearby. He gets up early on Saturday morning, sets up his little booth, gets some fresh creamery butter, and - no, he doesn't sell it, he gives away the garlic bread. And sells the garlic.

If I don't get there before 10:00 AM he's sold out. Every time.

[CDHart]

Thanks - but I'm not physically able to garden anymore.

Carolyn

[kcvl]

Catalpa Ridge Farm

4/1/07:

The Heirloom Tomato Transplant Sales are just around the corner!!! We currently have 80 varieties of Heirloom & Hybrid Tomatoes, including a limited number of the variety Ramapo. We received from Rutgers University, some Ramapo Tomato (heritage hybrid) seeds. This variety was known as the “true Jersey tomato” 30 years ago. A lot has been mentioned about heirloom tomato varieties, but there are also some excellent hybrid varieties that have gone by the wayside. This will be our first year growing the Ramapo Tomatoes and we look forward to your feedback on this an our other heritage hybrids.

[ErnBatavia]

Here in the desert, we're getting ready to try some seedlings as soon as we can find 'em.....this year we've gotten some large pots and will have a go at container grown, to test the success.

We pretty much need to have tomatoes done and harvested by late April or early May or our desert sun/heat ruins the fruit.......too much of a good thing, I guess.

[ErnBatavia]

the lycopene in tomatoes, the very stuff that makes them red, has health benefits for the prostate as well as a lot of other internal workings of the body

I did some studying of this and get the impression that cooking tomatoes greatly enhances the lycopene's effects.

[toddlintown]

More tomato news;

http://beerinfood.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/budweiser-clamato-chelada-and-bud-light-clamato-chelada-arrive-nationwide/

[joebuck]

"I grow tomatoes in my garden, the best that I have found are the “Big Boy” and “Best Boy” varieties."

My wife has a green thumb and has been growing Big Boy tomatoes at every place we've ever lived, including in the postage stamp sized back yard we have now. She always grows enough to have fresh sliced tomatoes with dinner every night during the summer. Life wouldn't be the same without them.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT

..................

[rightazrain]

“When I go to the farmer’s market my kids just start eating the tomatoes straight off the pile, all gone except the stem bit, except one of the kids eats that too. The owner gets a kick out of it every time. I guess kids devouring fresh tomatoes as if they were candy is a rare sight.”

I really am sure you are a great person.

Having said that, I must set the record straight for all those owners of farmers’ markets out there. I know; we used to own one.

Kids coming into their stores and freely grazing on their produce is their biggest Pet Peeve!

Sure, they’re smiling on the outside. They don’t wish to offend. But check out their tongues and you’ll see bleeding.

[KC Burke]

Not the frosted bottle, but the white bottle is the one they call "gold" and it is in clear plastic package. I mispelled it above....its Fini 12 Year Old

[Maverick68]

My late Grandpa, “Paw Teener” grew the best Tomatoes ever. The rows of his garden were littered with the remains of eaten tomatoes. We would stand in the rows with a shaker of salt and consume the crop like locusts....

[Drawsing]

Pick one off the vine, slice thick and put it on fresh bread with a little mayo, salt and pepper.

That's a "sink sandwich"....so juicy you have to eat it over the sink.

[girlangler]

Yikes, that’s cold. I’ve spent my entire life in the South, can’t imagine that kind of cold.

I still have parsley growing in my garden outside. We had three days of 10-15 degree weather (that’s major cold here, and we get a day to three days a year only of that kind of weather)but my parsley survived, as I mulched it heavily.

I also have some herbs growing in my kitchen window. I am so ready for spring, can’t imagine surviving the long and extremely cold weather up north.

We’ve also had some exceptionally warm weather days recently, in the 60s in January. My daffadils are pushing through the ground, and that always makes me want to go outside and start digging in the ground to plant things. Problem is, I always jump the gun and plant too early, so this year I’m going to try very hard to be patient.

[SJackson]

If you’d like to be on or off this Upper Midwest/outdoors/rural list please FR mail me. And ping me is you see articles of interest.

[alice_in_bubbaland]

We eat them in salads, on sandwich's and I make tomato sauce which I then can and freeze. At least once a week in the winter I serve my sauce. There is really nothing like home grown, home made tomato sauce on a cold winter night! I hardly ever buy store bought sauce anymore.

All this joy out of 24 plants!

[Hot Tabasco]

I love tomatos but can’t grow them to save my life. I wish TrappedInLiberalHell were still with us to participate on this thread......he had his own tomato website.

[capt. norm]

"I grow tomatoes in my garden, the best that I have found are the “Big Boy” and “Best Boy” varieties."

My neighbor has come up with the "lazy man's" approach to growing tomatoes and it solves two problems with trying to grow tomatoes in the Florida Panhandle coast.

Problem one is poor sandy soil. He solves this by buying one fifty pound bag of good growing soil at Walmart for each tomato plant he buys. He then cuts a big X on the top of each bag and plants the tomatoes in the opening.

He says that when he waters them "they stay watered"...unlike the usual results in this sandy soil where you water them and two hours later they are drooping over as all the water rapidly seeped through the sand and the plants just got a sip of it in passing.

Problem number two is excess sun...it can ruin tomatoes very quickly here. With his "tomatoes growing out of sacks" system, he can move them to a location with better shade if needed. They seem to prefer full sun in the morning and some shade during the heat of the day.

[Alouette]

I grew a crop of tomatoes in my backyard last summer.

I will never buy those red things they sell in the supermarkets, never.

[mplsconservative]

In more temperate winters, it’s always fun to brush the snow aside and find my little parsley plants. They are certainly hardy! No such luck this year though, this deep freeze will do them in.

I envy you folks in the Southern environs. What keeps us here is family and the promise of spring. The ‘hardy’ mentality gets a little harder to swallow the older I get. LOL

[katykelly]

Here are a few of the places I get my heirloom seed. Just do a google.

johnny’s selected seeds
seed savers exchange
totally tomatoes
tomatofest.com

[null and void]

My favorite tomato is Laurie Dhue

You're not the only one with that preference...

[Calpernia]

I have been growing so many tomatoes the past few years that I have been able to freeze and can for the full winters.

[girlangler]

Thanks, I really appreciate these.

[Lurker]

It would be my pleasure.

L

[cyberaxe]

We would stand in the rows with a shaker of salt and consume the crop like locusts....

.....i found an old "tuperware" salt shaker that has a good lid on it.....

.....used a bit of bailing string that i use on the mater plants and hung it on the t-post that keeps the cridders outa the gardin.....

.....never really hungry by the time super roles around in the summer.....;)

[EnquiringMind]

No state, country, or continent has better tomatoes than those grown in New Jersey, and that’s just a fact.

[JustaDumbBlonde]

It is against my gardening religion to pick a tomatoe when it is green unless, of course, I am preparing fried green tomatoes. The vine-ripening by the sun is the ONLY way to get the natural sugar content right.

[Mamzelle]

There’s a food ping list? I want on, please!

[Mamzelle]

Do you suppose the nurseries will start tomato plants from these seeds?

[xJones]

What a blessing from the Israelis! Now my problem will be trying to grow those lucious little darlings in Texas.

Seed companies stopped producing the Ramapo decades ago because commercial farmers sought varieties that grew well in other regions, and the Ramapo did well mostly along the East Coast, Rabin said.

[Mamzelle]

Asparagus was "ick" for me, too, until I started roasting them instead of all the other ways you're supposed to cook them. I still can't eat them steamed--they're tough and slimy.

Try drizzling sesame oil over them before roasting, and even some sesame seeds. Very good.

[Mamzelle]

I’ve found that the little grape tomatoes are very good.

[gardengirl]

Hey! Me too! Eastern NC checking in.
I got the store greenhouse up and running last week. No heat on yet—just cold crops started. Cabbage, broccoli, lettuces, chard, spinach, bak choi, etc. Won’t start the tomatoes/peppers until @ the 20th.

We had three days of cold last week, back into the 70’s, supposed to be in the mid 30’s tonight. The plants don’t stand a chance.

We’ve had a lot of trouble growing tomatoes the last few years due to tomato spotted wilt. It’s a disease carried by thrips. If the plant doesn’t die outright, it’s stunted and the tomatoes are splotchy yellow and taste off.

We also have bacterial wilt—in the soil—and the only thing that kills it is cold weather. Ha! I can’t remember the last time the ground froze here.

Any disease that tobacco can get, tomatoes can get. The only variety that seems to make it any more is sweet million, and even they bit the dust last year.

We carried a variety last year called Christa. They did really well—the ones that survived! It’s so difficult to grow tomatoes any more. Seems like they used to last all summer. Now, it you don’t get some by late June/early July, you can forget it. The heat gets them. How about you?

[antiRepublicrat]

Kids coming into their stores and freely grazing on their produce is their biggest Pet Peeve!

I was wondering if I should have explained this in the original post. It started when I would fill my basket with the tomatoes and immediately the kids would dive in (I always had to buy extra to account for this). He liked the kids loving straight tomatoes so much (rare sight, I guess) that he started handing the kids free tomatoes when we walked in. Then it turned into just let them pick themselves, especially when he's busy.

This happens in various places. In Germany if you go to a butcher they will always give the kids a large slice of wurst (basically, baloney). It keeps the kids happy and less likely to be a disturbance. In this case it also makes for excellent customer relations, as I always go back there.

[xJones]

Call me a crude cook, but I love those new steamer microwave bags. They leave all the taste in and don’t make vegetables soggy, IMHO.

[Ignatz]

Getting the right level of crispness for Asparagus is so difficult that it is the only vegetable where I defer the cooking to others.

Here's my favorite way to prepare fresh asparagus:
Preheat oven to 450
Arrange rinsed and dried asparagus on a foil-lined baking sheet.
Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil
Sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.
Roast for 10-12 minutes.

Variation:
Wrap asparagus in prosciutto before roasting.
Sprinkle with freshly grated parmigiana reggiano cheese after roasting.

[rightazrain]

Sounds like you had an excellent evolving relationship with your farmer’s market owner.

I also thought my post might grate a bit, in hindsight. But a lot of people have no idea how badly some kids can behave with their parents standing right there grinning wide.

So many kids have wonderful parents and behave appropriately. But the ones that are not taught that it isn’t yours unless it is paid for or freely given are going to have problems later on.

Thanks for the good-natured response.

[Sender]

I grew tomatoes for the very first time last year, in big containers. They started out great, I had several delicious ones fairly early, then a swarm of little white flies descended on my 'mater plants and the leaves started yellowing and the plants got stunted and the whole darn tomato factory went to heck.

I want to try again this year, and I need to be ready to repel the little white flies which brought destruction.

[jerry639]

After World War II, most of the large-scale commercial farms moved to warmer climates like Florida and California. What remains in New Jersey today are tomatoes for fresh use, at supermarkets, restaurants and farm stands.

Oh Really! Now I am wondering what those round red things growing on a vine were that I use to pick when I was young back in 1947-1957 here in Indiana. They told me they were tomatoes.