Best Preserving Tomatoes

In 2008 I grew a selection of tomatoes for preserving because I wanted to see if there was anything better than my usual favourite, San Marzano.  Now that I am thinking about what varieties to grow this year it’s a good time to review my little trial.

A selection of cooking and preserving tomatoes

Tomatoes make some of the most useful and delicious preserves for winter, things like: passata, coulis de tomate, tomato concentrate, pastes and sauces and of course dried tomatoes so I like to grow plenty of tomatoes to conserve. With any comparison it is worth bearing in mind the criteria; I am looking for tomatoes that produce in abundance, with dense, dryish flesh, few seeds, easy to peel/process, with good colour and of course flavour; I want intense deep flavours when cooked or dried.  Here’s what I found.

The standard bearer – San Marzano II, 2008

San Marzano

Large, 10cm long, blocky plum shaped, red tomatoes, with dry flesh and few seeds. The fruit is almost hollow with only two seed cavities and dry flesh, which makes it excellent for drying and great for bottling whole.
The tomatoes are easy to peel once scalded, when cooked the tomato flavour intensifies and so does the colour so they are great for sauces and passata. I find the plants are best grown as double cordons (that is with two stems trained up a hefty metal pole). Plants are robust and will stand up well to high temperatures and strong winds but  San Marzano tomatoes really don’t like to get too dry at the roots and are prone to blossom end rot if there is too much moisture fluctuation, so they do need an extra bit of care to grow well. San Marzano are prolific producing huge vines of long red plum tomatoes over a long period, typically in my garden from July right up until the first frosts so even if dry spells affect them early on in the season they will still carry on and produce good fruit later on. Verdict Still top of the pile in my opinion as an all round conserving tomato, particularly for passata, drying and bottling. If I could only grow one variety for conserving it would be this one. If you raise them carefully they are a great, if not the best, conserving tomato.

Roma VF

The other classic conserving tomato is Roma, popular with the canning industry and I can understand why, it is so easy to process and tastes great. It is a wonderful deep red, plump plum tomato with a little point on the blossom end. The tomatoes are thin skinned, with thick juicy flesh and a deep rich tomatoey taste. Plants are very productive, I grew six plants, which produced buckets of fruit. This variety of Roma is a determinate one and the bulk of the crop was ready to harvest at the same time, which can be useful if you want to do your conserving in one big batch. It was also pretty resilient and had no problem with blossom end rot when San Marzano was affected.Verdict Roma really came out as contender because the tomatoes were actually better than San Marzano for flavour and texture when cooked but the messy sprawling growth habit and short cropping season meant that San Marzano would win out in my garden. However I think growing both is ideal for my purposes, a big crop of tomatoes for preserving in quantity as well as a steady supply over 4 months. Perhaps a double row; with San Marzano at the back and these shorter plants on the front of a south facing row.

Cornu Des Andes

Now this tomato was a real surpsrise, producing great big pointy pepper shaped tomatoes with solid meaty flesh, good taste and easy to peel once scalded. I found it was able to withstand dry / wet fluctuations (a real problem with the summer we had in 2008) and seems to be less prone to blossom-end-rot than San Marzano. However the big downside was that it was not an abundant producer and produced only a small number of fruits. Plants were frail in comparison to San Marzano with thin straggly stems that needed lots of support.  Individual fruits are larger and meatier than San Marzano, so 1 or 2 fruits were enough for most dishes, but the plants sadly did not produce very many fruits.  NB I only grew 2 plants in this trial so it is a limited sample from which to draw any firm conclusions. Verdict All in all I loved Cornu Des Andes despite its low productivity, it had great flavour and a wonderful dense, smooth texture. It really is a superb cooking and conserving tomato. I’ll definitely grow it again and maintain the seeds. Hopefully I will be able to select the seeds over the years to develop a more robust and productive strain in the future because I’ll want more of these little beauties.

Oroma

Very disappointed with this variety. I chose it from the Kokopelli seed catalogue because it said the variety is easy to peel which would be an advantage for a conserving or cooking tomato, however I found it impossible to peel untreated and no easier than Cornu des Andes or Roma VF and in fact I found it more difficult to peel than San Marzano, once scalded. The tomatoes are a slender plum, pale red with poor mealy flesh. The plants are determinate and in my garden they sprawled about the place and were a mess in no time. It provided a fairly meagre crop compared to the others in this trial. All can be forgiven for a tasty tomato but this one failed even that and had no particularly distinguishing taste.  All in all a pretty poor show. With so many other great tomatoes I won’t even give this one a second go.

Principe Borghese

This was the biggest disappointment of my trial of 2008. I had such high hopes for this tomato because every reference I’ve found for it claims it as the best variety for drying. Sadly, in my experience, nothing could be have been further from the truth and any one of the other tomatoes I tried drying made a better sun-dried tomato than these did. The skins are so thick, the flesh was thin and watery and there are so many seeds in these small tomatoes that by the time they are fully dried they are actually difficult to eat; a tough almost inedible morsel that tastes of very little because all that is left is skin and seeds. Nasty!
On the plus side the plants are prolific and produce big bunches of small, deep red fruit, plum shaped with a point on the blossom end and lots of them, however the determinate habit also means that if left alone the plants get a bit wild for my liking and end up spilling over neighbouring crops. I ended up taking out some of the side shoots to calm the things down. 
Verdict I don’t want to reject this tomato on the basis of only one season’s growth but I did give it a fair chance with six plants, and frankly I don’t want to grow lots of useless tomatoes. I got the seeds in a swap so it may be there are better strains out there and I could give this variety another go with another batch of seeds if anyone has seeds they can recommend trying. As it stands I think they are really too small, seedy and tough skinned to be a good conserving tomato, they make terrible sun-dried tomatoes and are not well flavoured enough as a salad tomato. They do have one advantage however and that is that the tough skins mean they store well and seem to last a really long time, particularly if left on the vine. I also tried freezing this variety, which worked quite well, you still have the skins and seeds to deal with, but they provide a useful winter soup or stew ingredient.

Porter

I grew an old variety from Texas called Porter in 2007 because I was looking for tomatoes that could stand dessert conditions. I ended up with a few ‘volunteers’ turn up in the potager 2008, which made for a useful comparison when looking for the best conserving tomatoes in my trial. The fruits are of a similar shape and size to Principe Borghese but are a dark pink colour with dense flesh and fewer seeds.
Verdict These tomatoes can work as a sauce tomato as they have thin skins and less seeds and can easily be put through a passata machine or sieve to make a fairly decent, though less red passata, particularly if roasted first. In comparison however, they really are not as good as San Marzano, Roma or Cornu Des Andes for cooking nor as good as some of the cherry or olive types for eating fresh. However, the big plus for Porter in my garden is that they are robust, prolific and will stand high temperatures, dry conditions and even neglect and still crop well. So I think it is worth carrying the seeds forward and growing them every few years to keep the supply going.

A few others worth a mention
Not strictly conserving tomatoes but I found that the juicier beefsteak tomatoes: Double Rich and Cuostrallee also make particularly good chutneys and sauces.

Read more about making tomato paste and  preserving tomatoes on my recipes site, Kitchen Garden Recipes.