Whether or not to salt was brought up for discussion (we went the purist, no-salt route), and so were topics like multilobed shapes (less usable flesh, but a turn-on for some), heirlooms versus hybrids (not all hybrids are bad), corky tissue (a fatal flaw), and “star cracking” (not a deal-breaker). Our judges ranked the tomatoes on a ten-point scale, a “ten,” by general agreement, being a tomato that possessed the highest levels of both acid and sugar, exquisite balance, an inviting mouthfeel, and that certain quality known among love-apple aficionados as tomato-y-ness. We threw in a few gourmet-grocer and supermarket specimens for good measure, and then we convened an expert panel of lycopene addicts including Goldman, Gramercy Tavern’s Michael Anthony, and Dan Kluger of ABC Kitchen to have at them in a blind taste-test.
To find out, we asked a dozen or so Greenmarket vendors to recommend their ripest, juiciest, most fully flavored fresh-eating (as opposed to cooking) tomato one recent Saturday morning. On the other, it’s the kind of task any tomato fanatic would happily engage in. But who grows the best? On one hand, it’s foolhardy to even attempt to answer this question, as every single piece of fruit, even those grown side by side on the same plant, can vary in flavor from week to week and day to day. Celebrity tomato man Tim Stark of Greenmarket’s Eckerton Hill Farm stand traffics in over 100 varieties (both heirloom and hybrid) alone. There are close to 6,000 varieties of cultivated tomatoes out there, according to Amy Goldman, author of The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table (Bloomsbury, 2008), and you can find not a few of them at the Union Square Greenmarket: Cherokee Purples, Green Giants, Brandywines, Great Whites, German Pinks, Banana Legs, Paul Robesons, and Green Zebras, for starters.
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