The Problem With Heirloom Tomatoes

Okay, what's for dinner tonight?

Spaghetti was on the menu. I wanted to make green spaghetti out of our Aunt Ruby's German Green heirloom tomatoes. Aunt Ruby's tomatoes taste absolutely fabulous, although it is somewhat peculiar, in that they are fully ripe when they are green (to be precise, they are green when they are ripe)! I was out-voted, red was the color de jour, and our first instinct was to make the sauce from our regular field tomatoes, which do indeed taste darn good; however, I have a heck of a lot of faith in my taste buds, and I know that almost all of our heirloom tomatoes (with the exception of the yellow ones) taste better than the regular ones, so we made our spaghetti sauce out of Brandywine Pink heirloom tomatoes (and if you are keeping score, this is the longest sentence in our blog so far, so there). Phew.

You know what? That sauce was fantastic: Brandywine Pink tomatoes, Ailsa Craig onions, garlic (not from China), portobello mushrooms, sweet red pepper, a touch of jalapeno, and a splash of vino tinto (we grew everything except the 'shrooms and garlic, btw). Usually we use our regular tomatoes, with some tomato paste, plus the other goodies (no cow in either recipe), and to be perfectly honest Wendy and I were both, independently, blown away by the superior taste of the heirloom tomato sauce. Heirloom tomatoes taste so good!

So, what's the problem?

Well, heirloom tomatoes tend to have funny shapes. The Brandywines come in assorted shapes and sizes, and often have awkward marks on the bottom -it takes a bit of work to cut them out, especially if you're making large batches. We were planning on canning a couple of bushels of tomatoes this weekend. Usually we use the Romas -they're perfectly shaped, consistently sized, blemish free -fast and easy to work with! The choice is clear: fast and pretty good, or slow and scrumptious! I guess I'll be chopping tomatoes this weekend.

One last thing: I almost forgot the economics of the whole endeavour -heirloom tomatoes are about three times the price of Romas!