Snakeroot Organic Farm says:

Fall is the time for . . .

Paste Tomatoes

Paste tomatoes often get a bad rap. Many folks think of them as odd varieties fit only for processing. While this may be true for some varieties of paste tomatoes, it’s hardly true for all of them.

Paste tomatoes are those which are less juicy and more meaty than your average tomato. This makes them ideal for turning into tomato sauce or tomato paste because there is less water to boil away in order to thicken the sauce or paste. But this same feature makes them also ideal for adding to salads and salsas, where you won’t find them leaving a lake of juice at the bottom of the bowl. Or making a sandwich where the tomato doesn’t get the bread all soggy or run juice down to your elbow when you take a bite.

Just like regular tomatoes, paste tomatoes come in all shapes, sizes and colors, and can be either heirlooms or hybrids. At Snakeroot, we grow four heirloom varieties of paste tomatoes, three Italian and one we developed ourselves. The Italians are all red: the smallest and very familiar is Roma, followed by the slightly longer San Marzano. If you read the labels of imported Italian paste tomatoes, you’ll see both of these varieties mentioned.

The largest and oddly shaped red variety is the Hogheart, brought over from Italy in the mid 1980s by an enthusiastic gardener. We liked it a lot, so we’ve been saving seeds from them ever since. Hoghearts are four to six inches long and one to two inches wide, and come to a point on the end. This makes them look very much like an italian frying pepper; we’ve even had shoppers who pick one up and ask why our peppers are so heavy!

Our pride in paste tomatoes goes to the Snakeroot Golden Arrow, a tomato we have been selecting and saving seed for since 1998 when we started by saving seed from the small hybrid Italian Gold, a golden Roma-type paste tomato. Ever since we have been selecting for greater size and length so that today we have what looks very much like a golden hogheart. One year we only saved seed from tomatoes that were still living in the field at the end of the season, thereby selecting for disease resistance. The Snakeroot Golden Arrow is the driest tomato I have ever seen; if you slice it on a cutting board, no juice comes out—this is one tomato that will not make your sandwich soggy! It also contains very few seeds. But if we’ve just developed this variety, why do we call it an heirloom? Think for a minute: where do heirlooms originally come from?

 

We often mix the Golden Arrows and Hoghearts in the same crate because the mix of deep red and golden yellow colors is so striking. All of our paste tomatoes are available by the pound or by the crate in any variety mix you’d like. We even have some of our #2 canners that are mostly paste tomatoes. Winter is coming and tomato sauce season is now. Make the best of it.