if you make a salad with tomatoes they must be vine ripened

[mshanj]

Just poped round a friends for brunch, yum I thought when she had made a salad.

I don't want to sound ungrateful but the tomatoes were just basically red cold tasteless mush. Aibu to think there is no point of a Greek salad without decent tomatoes?

I do think the standard, cheapish tomatoes are a bit tasteless (as in lack flavour, not in the other sense). Vine ripened essential, probably not. I like pomodorino tomatoes best for salad, personally.

I only eat Greek salad in Greece, I think it's a bit common otherwise.

I still have tomatoes ripening in my (unheated) greenhouse. Apparently nobody's told them they're not in season.

All tomatoes are vine ripened.

I don't think so. Lots are picked while green and ripened with ethylene while in storage. Unripe tomatoes are firmer and less likely to be damaged in transit, which is why this is done.

Keeping tomatoes in the fridge is a very bad thing. They need to be at room temperature to finish ripening and so you can really taste them.

I'd have been disappointed too, OP. I hope you had a nice time with your friend otherwise.

It's all gone a bit 80's!
Kalamarta eh? Ooo, get you and your foodie expertise.

Tell us about the feta OP, bet it wasn't flown in from Athens this very morn was it

The Greeks do know how to mail a tomato though. They look a bit manky at the market but they are sublime. Just need a little salt and I could eat a whole plate for lunch.

Then there's my DDad's which he lovingly grows every year. I sit in the door of his greenhouse and eat them straight off the plant like strawberries.

The problem with tomatoes in this country is that we put them in the fridge.

If you put a yummy never refrigerated tomato next to a flavourless tomato the flavourless one will turn nice. I don't know why this works.

I buy cheap to tomatoes then leave them in a bowl for a week. They then ripen and taste lovley.

And who has a salad for brunch

I don't think they need to be bought on the vine, but they do need to be reasonably ripe and flavoursome otherwise what's the point? Rock hard, barely red, tasteless tomatoes are a waste of time and money.

Aibu to think there is no point of a Greek salad without decent tomatoes?

Erm how about calorific content and nutritional value? Or just the act of sociability of eating with someone.

If you don't like it, don't eat it. Problem solved.

Vine ripened tomatoes are a rip-off. That lovely smell you sometimes get is the smell of the vine, not the tomato, and you don't eat the vine, so why pay more for this?

I get my tomatoes, you know basic ones, out of the fridge to allow them to warm to room temp, and then they taste great.

Cold tomatoes don't taste very good.

How do you eat something through gritted teeth? Do you blitz it with a stick blender and drink it through a straw? TBH, that does sound pretty rank so, on that basis, YANBU.

Glad I don't have 'friends' like you mshanj.

Your friend made an effort to invite you round and make you food and all you can do is complain. Maybe scouldn't afford vine rippened tomatoes and posh olives? YABVVVU.

I like a basic cheery tomato too. I often buy a bag and eat the lot on the journey home from the supermarket.

You could say I'm partial to a tomato. They're very good for you too I read.

If someone goes to the trouble of preparing and serving me a meal I haven't had to plan, shop for, buy or cook, I gratefully accept it bite their arm off and clear my plate.

I don't bitch about the perceived 'inferiority' of the ingredients. Maybe that's all your friend could afford OP?

Just wondering what our outmoded class structure could possibly have to do with being able to tell the difference between marketing speak tasteless 'vine ripened tomatoes' which smell only of the tomato leaves and good, nutrition, delicious food of a ripe, delicious tomatoe? Sigh.

If only I had a friend that invited me for lunch......

I bet she served you cheap Green & Black's chocolate for afters.

We got lost in Kalamata once. Ended up navigating using a child's compass in the shape of a ladybird which DS3 had helpfully packed. Damn good olives sustained us through the hell.

You lost me at 'brunch' I'm afraid. Are you a hobbit?

Are you the Green & Blacks hater ?

ouryve Great minds...

Did she have a dirty lav an' all OP?

Oh I just realised the OP is the one with the very 'sophisticated pallet' on the Heston thread.

Sophisticated pallets obviously don't always have manners.

A - most [and by that I mean all] supermarket tomatoes were grown in water, not soil and that is why they taste so weak.
B - as soon as you put a tomato in the fridge it kills any taste that it originally had. Don't do it!
C - I am still picking tomatoes in our unheated polytunnel, which is in north nottinghamshire. Last year I was still picking tomatoes from my unheated greenhouse up until the last one which was picked on Christmas eve.
D - even though I grow all my own toms, and never buy them from the uk supermarkets - I am not that much of a snob to be upset with a friend who uses bland tomatoes in their cooking - that is just completely outlandish and she should drop you from her friendship group immediately.