Can you actually taste a difference between Tomatoes?

In this video, we are doing a deep dive into tomatoes.

📚 Videos & Sources mentioned:
▪ On Food & Cooking, Harold McGee

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
1:43 What are tomatoes?
4:46 How are tomatoes grown? @epicgardening
8:44 Why are farmer’s market tomatoes better than grocery store ones?
11:57 Should you refrigerate tomatoes?
13:06 BLT Test
16:16 3 Categories of Tomatoes
17:18 Heirloom Tomato Test
21:04 What is the flavor of tomatoes?
22:20 Snacking Tomatoes Test
23:55 What happens to tomatoes when cooked?
25:35 Do Organic tomatoes taste better? (Test)
28:00 What are the best canned tomatoes?
28:26 How to shop for tomatoes year round

MISC. DETAILS
Filmed on: Sony FX3 & Sony A7C
Voice recorded on Shure MV7
Edited in: Premiere Pro

Affiliate Disclosure:

[EthanChlebowski]

Tomato season is almost coming to an end in Texas, I may need to travel to the east coast during August & September to prolong the season and get my fix 👀

[epicgardening]

Grocery store tomatoes are certified NOT EPIC. Grow your own ;) - thanks for the feature, Ethan. Keep on growing, Kevin

[lightspiritblix]

One of my coworkers had a friend who passed away two years ago, and left behind an old WWII military uniform. Inside, was a packet of tomato seeds labeled "Germany 1945". Only 3 plants grew from that initial packet of like 60 seeds, but the tomatoes they made were enormous, closer in size to a grapefruit or a small melon. And they were delicious. He preserved the seeds from one and now has an heirloom line of "Nazi tomatoes", and every year he gives away plants from that line to coworkers and friends

[DatKrayon]

For whoever need it:

If you find a really nice tomato variety and want to save seed, don't just scrape the seeds on a paper towel. They will stick to the towel and the goo around the seeds inhibits germination later on, so you would need to sow more seed to guarantee success.

Instead, scrape out the seeds with the goo, add a bit of water and put that in a jar covered with a bound cloth. Let that sit in a warm place and start to ferment for ~5-7 days and shake up every few days.

If you pass that trough a strainer you'll get perfectly goo-less seeds that you can then dry without them sticking

[elias]

I work at farmers markets in Germany and I love that you show flawed tomatoes in your video. It is so important for people to understand that flawed fruit and vegetables are perfectly fine.

[missinglinq]

Home grown tomatoes are such a treat. Incomparable to store bought.

[randolphpinkle]

Some people dislike tomatoes because they've never tasted a perfectly ripe one off the vine. It's like the humble banana. I didn't truly taste a banana until I picked one off a tree in Sri Lanka. Orange skinned and small, it was a revelation.

[donscott]

I love tomatoes and, as a life long restaurant cook, was excited to better understand the different varieties/flavors commonly available

[daveskix]

The purple tomato he likes so much is called Cherokee Purple in NJ. I have 4 of those, but I'm still waiting for them to ripen. Unfortunately, if I fully ripen on the vine, the mockingbirds come and ruin the fruit. I lost a lot 2 years ago.

[jacksonsanborn]

1:48 minor correction. Gooseberries are NOT related to nightshades. Physalis Peruviana common called the misnomer “Cape Gooseberry” is a relative of ground cherries which is a tomatillo like plant in the nightshade family. True Gooseberries are in the currant family and do not have a papery husk as is common with nightshade fruits.

[bridgiesue]

No way Kevin was featured 😂 I've been subbed to him for years, totally was not expecting this colab!

[Crowbars]

Another reason why people were scared of tomatoes during and before the early 1800's was because not only did they _think_ they were poisonous, they also appeared to be poisonous as well. Tomatoes are quite acidic, and when eaten on pewter plates like many wealthy people did during and before the 1800's, it leached lead (and possibly antimony) from the pewter plates, causing many cases of lead poisoning. This lead people to believe that the tomatoes themselves were poisonous, rather than the plates they ate off of.

[alexaramachandran]

growing & eating your own tomatoes is a joy unlike any other

[stephanromero]

I heard a lot of the tomato varieties in the US are made, not with taste in mind, but with shelf life and ease of cultivation

[ivacheung]

Quick note about vine ripening: you don't have to fully ripen tomatoes on the vine to get maximum flavour. When they're about halfway ripe, they've got all they need from the plant to completely develop their flavour. You can pick them then and let them fully ripen on your kitchen counter.

[MajoraZ]

To be clear "Tomatl" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, referred to Tomatillos! What we call "Tomatoes" today would have been "Xitomatl": See David Bowles's Medium post for more on the etymology. Also, while in this case culinary history is a tiny part of the video in general, I do wish that with New World crops, people spoke more about their Pre-Columbian use, not just them originating in the Americas and then solely talking about their use in Eurasia: Ancient Americas for example has a 40 min video on Chocolate's culinary, economic, and ritual use by Mesoamerican civilizations like the Aztec and Maya (I helped write that video!).

In general, there's a lot more info out there then you might expect on botany and horticulture by Mesoamerican civilizations, the Aztec especially, because the Columbian exchange was NOT just Spain etc exporting New World crops, but also seeking their botanical and medical knowledge, the Aztec especially having really developed sciences for those areas, with botanical gardens acting as sites of study and for experimentation and to stock medical herbs, hydroponics, etc. The rest of this comment will be a bigger explanation of that, if anybody is curious!



Mesoamerican city planning in general had a big emphasis on incorporating open and naturalistic or green spaces into urban areas, with city centers organizing temples, palaces, etc around plazas, and palaces in turn having open-air courtyards rooms were arranged around, with gardens often being built into communal spaces or inside or around palaces. Around the main urban core of cities, you then radial suburbs of commoner residences extending out, interspersed with agricultural land or managed natural reserves and agroforestry.


But the Aztec sort of took this to another level. Most of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital (which was located in the middle of a lake, now drained) was built out of artificial islands known as chinampas, which involved staking out the shallow lakebed, filling it with layers of soil and vegetative matter, and then anchoring it to the lakebed via planting Willow trees; with canals left between the plots. This used both to make extra urban/residential land and as hydroponic farms, all while his used local soils, preserving the existing ecology with fish and amphibians, the trees acting as wind breakers and the canals/plots as flood management. So a huge amount of the city was criss-crossed with Venice like canals that ran through suburbs with tons of greenery and flowers, and then you also had massive, richly painted palace and temple complexes, giant markets, aqueducts, royal zoos, aquariums, aviaries, etc.

It was REALLY common for Aztec rulers to have giant botanical gardens built into palaces or royal retreats: At Huaxtepec, Moctezuma II had a royal botanical garden that covered 10 square kilometers with over 2000 kinds of plants, some of which were intentionally brought in from different climates to see if they would grow there. At Texcotzinco, a site of a royal palace retreat, baths, and gardens for Nezahualcoyotl, the most famous king of the second most powerful Aztec city, Texcoco; the bathes and gardens were fed water via a 5 mile long series of aqauaducts, which at some points rose 150 feet off the ground and had a series of pools and channels to regulate the flow rate. This aqueduct then formed a circuit around the hilltop the palace and baths were at, where the water flowed into fountains and shrines with painted frescos and sculptures, and then finally formed artificial waterfalls that watered the terraced gardens at the hills base, which had different sections to emulate different Mexican biomes and ecosystems.

As the playing around with ecology and growing conditions implies, a lot of these royal gardens weren't just recreational elite pleasures, but were actually a precursor to modern academic botanical gardens (indeed, it's been suggested the first European examples of that, which show up in Europe within the next century or so, were inspired by Aztec examples, since there's some other academic borrowing of botanical science, which I'll get back to): You had them stocking plants used for medical purposes, experimenting with growing conditions and properties, sorting them into taxonomic systems (not phylogentically, because no theory of natural selection, but still a formal taxonomic system, even with a binominal naming scheme!) etc! I don't know if we have sources discussing the management of them, but we know that Moctezuma's zoo and aviary had full time staff to care for animals and (take this with a grain of salt as I can't relocate the source, I may be thinking of Jaguar remains at the Templo Mayor or at Teotihuacan) there's even been Jaguar remains found that had healed surgical wounds, so there surely would have been career botanists caring for and overseeing things.

Sadly, of course, almost all Prehispanic Mesoamerican books and documents were burned by the Spanish, but we do have some surviving botanical documentation, mostly from sources with joint Aztec-Spanish authorship made during the early colonial period, such as the Badianus Manuscript and books 10 and 11 in the Florentine Codex. Both of these sources also describe a ton of pharmaceutical and medical applications for plants and herbs, with the Aztec also having really developed medical and sanitation practices for the time (there was an entire fleet of civil servants that washed buildings and streets and collected waste from public toilets to reuse for fertilizers and dyes, to name one example), with tons of toothpastes, mouthwashes, soaps, colognes, perfumes, laxatives, and ointments made from plants; recorded surgeries for skin grafts, eye surgeries, the first recorded use of intramedullary nails to set broken bones, better understanding of the circulatory system then Europe at the time (perhaps not surprising given sacrifices...), etc. Francico Hernandez, the personal naturalist and physician to Philip II, actually traveled to Mexico and documented Aztec medicine, botany, and zoology (sadly only some of his records on this survive) and begrudgingly admitted Aztec sciences here were better then Spain's, something Cortes and Motolinía also claimed.

And then there's all the ways flowers and plants played into art and poetry and such. People love to talk about sacrifice and skulls and such with the Aztec, but ANY sort of context you could possible imagine they'd find a way to slap flowers or birds/feathers or jade into things artistically, and those 3 things were seen as the prime symbols of luxury and elegance, in the same way we talk about Gold or Diamonds. Newborn children were talked about by their parents in nursery songs as bundles of jade or flowers or precious feathers, The word for "poetry" in Nahuatl/the Aztec language literally meant "flowery song", soldiers who died in combat were reborn as hummingbirds or butterflies to suckle on nectar in a floral solar afterlife; while another afterlife, Tlalocan, was a tropical mountain paradise with lakes, streams, and springs, which many royal botanical gardens were an emulation of.

For people who wanna read more on this, I recommend "An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552" (an annotated translation of the Badianus manuscript) and "Flora of the Codex Cruz-Badianus" (there's also some high res color scans of the original Badianus manuscript online on the INAH's mediateca site); Book 10/11 of the Florentine Codex, "Public Health in Aztec Society", "Aztec Medicine by Francisco Guerra" (though it repeats outdated, disproven info re: inflated sacrifice totals), "Empirical Aztec Medicine by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano", and "Precious Beauty: The Aesthetic and Economic Value of Aztec Gardens" (and a lot of papers/books by Susan Toby Evans, who is an expert on mesoamerican gardens and palaces), and Kelly McDonough and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria's research on testing Aztec medical treatments. A lot of this stuff is published online for free as open access research, too. I also have extended writeups about this I've made myself (I do essays and help history/archeology channels with stuff on Mesoamerica), if people want that messag me on twitte, I'm Majora__Z

[francisrodriguez]

Tomatoes are the only vegetable i find worth growing at home. It's such a huge difference vs grocery. Great video. Regarding refrigeration, my experience is it affects texture more than flavor (if you let them come back to room temp) and is dependent on how cold your fridge is. A very cold fridge seems to do more damage and lead to a worse quality.

[HickoryDickory]

For those who like growing their own tomatoes, Joseph Lofthouse, who advocates for landrace gardening, has reintroduced wild tomato genetics from South America and allowed them to freely (he calls it "promiscuously") pollinate with many different heirloom varieties. You can get some of his seeds if you want to experiment and see what comes up. You might be able to develop new, robust varieties that are highly adapted to your area.

[josephbowers]

Ethan- you are the modern day Alton Brown, taking us on deep dives into the history, varieties, and uses of multiple individual ingredients.

[PersiAndLeo]

Man, never expected to see Eric make an appearance on an Ethan Chlebowski video, Epic Gardening is spreading and I love it!