A notebook about tomatoes
From garden to pot: the rules that actually matter, the shortcuts worth taking, and the slow sauces worth making time for.
Start with storage →
About this notebook
The Tomato Notebook grew out of a few seasons of growing Gardener's Delight on a south-facing wall, losing a crop to blight, and eventually working out why the fruit from the market never tastes the same as the fruit from the garden. These notes are practical: storage, the canned question, slow sauce, and the hard work of a proper salad.
No health claims here. Just a serious interest in getting the best out of a serious fruit.
The notebook
Each one tackles a question that comes up every year, usually in August when the plants are heavy.
Cold destroys the volatile compounds that make a tomato worth eating. Here's why the counter is always the right answer — and for how long.
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The honest answer: canned wins in winter, fresh wins in August, and the choice isn't always about taste.
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Three hours. Minimal stirring. The result is something no shop jar has ever replicated — and it freezes beautifully.
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An hour in a hot oven turns even mediocre tomatoes into something worth eating. The technique behind the caramelisation.
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Salt the tomatoes first. Let them sit. The liquid that comes out is part of the dressing. Most people skip this step.
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When the plants give more than you can eat in a week, these are the methods worth having — sauce, passata, slow-roast, and the ones you eat straight off the vine.
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The pantry question
Between October and June, the tomatoes on supermarket shelves were picked hard, shipped cold, and gassed into redness in a warehouse. The flavour compounds never develop. A good tin of whole San Marzano plums, picked ripe and packed within hours, is a different ingredient entirely.
Canned for sauces, braises, and anything that cooks for more than fifteen minutes. Fresh — and only good fresh — for salads, quick salsas, and eating out of hand in the garden.
Read the full comparison →The temperature rule
Refrigerating a ripe tomato is the single most effective way to ruin it. Below 12°C, the enzymes that produce flavour compounds shut down — not temporarily, permanently. The texture turns mealy, the smell disappears, the fruit tastes like wet paper.
A bowl on the counter, stem side down, somewhere out of direct afternoon sun. That's the whole rule.
Read the storage notes →
From the notebook
A working week with tomatoes
When you buy well on Monday and treat them right, Friday's sauce is already in motion.
Markets over supermarkets. Local over imported. Sniff the stem end — if it smells of nothing, the flavour will match.
Stem side down in a bowl, out of direct sun. Check daily. They'll tell you when they're ready.
Salad for lunch. Salt first, let them sit. Slice thickly, dress simply, eat immediately — this is what they're for.
The ones going soft go into a roasting tin. An hour at high heat and they're sweeter, richer, and good for two days.
Roasted tomatoes, a tin of whole plums, olive oil, low heat, three hours. Freeze half. That's the week done well.
From readers
"The sauce recipe. I've made it every weekend since August. It tastes like the sauce from a trattoria I visited in 1998 and have been chasing ever since."
"I've been growing Gardener's Delight for six years and never knew about the cold storage thing. Genuinely changed how the kitchen smells in August."
"The fresh vs canned piece settled an argument I'd been having with my mother for ten years. She's still not fully convinced but she did buy San Marzanos last week."
Common questions
If they're genuinely ripe and you need to keep them for more than three days, the fridge is the lesser evil — but the flavour will suffer. Better to use them, cook them, or freeze them as sauce.
Whole plum tomatoes, ideally San Marzano DOP if the budget stretches. Avoid pre-chopped, which often use lower-grade fruit. The tin should contain tomatoes and possibly juice — nothing else.
In order of preference: eat raw while they're perfect, make and freeze sauce, slow-roast and freeze in portions, make passata. Chutney is a last resort — don't waste a great tomato on sugar and vinegar.
Uneven watering, usually. The plant gets dry, you water heavily, the fruit expands faster than the skin can stretch. Mulch to keep moisture consistent, and water little and often rather than big hits twice a week.
Gardener's Delight for reliability and sweetness. Costoluto Fiorentino if you have the space and the season. Sungold for the best cherry. Ask your local seed merchant what does well in your specific climate — that beats any general recommendation.
"The tomato is the only fruit that everyone agrees is a vegetable — which tells you something about how seriously we take it."
A note from the notebook
Spotlight
Ninety-four per cent water, by weight. The remaining six per cent is sugars, acids, flavour compounds, lycopene, and everything else that makes a tomato worth growing rather than skipping. That six per cent is the whole point. Storage, ripening temperature, the choice of variety, how long you cook it — every decision you make about a tomato is a decision about that six per cent.
Start with storage →