To expect tomotoes to taste

[Sunny67]

I've just had a ham and tomato sandwich for lunch, made with beef tomato. It didn't taste of anything! I've tried salad tomatoes, cherry and vine ripened over the last couple of weeks but might as well have used a sponge. I know it's winter so these are all going to be imported but even so. It's not much better in summer unless I grow my own!
Whinge over!

Thanet Earth's tomolino tomatoes from M&S are the best I've found for taste.

I used to grow my own from seed - Big Boy beefsteak - but too many years of being caught out by blight put an end to that.

I quite enjoy baby plum tomatoes from Tesco at the moment and find them reasonably tasty, but any other sort seem like tasteless and watery crap.

I like trying to grow my own and may well give it another go this year. The last time I tried though I ended up kicking myself because I planted them in a growbag outdoors, forgetting that it would be nigh on impossible to protect them fully from my labrador. Surprise, surprise, he gobbled them all and I got none. Think I may have to look for a variety I can grow on the kitchen windowsill.

Are you keeping them in the fridge? That affects the taste. Lots of things are kept in the fridge that shouldn't be...

M&S Santini tomatoes are ok but not amazing, we used to get them from Abel & Cole but they were of dubious quality.

Really we should eat tomatoes in summer when they are naturally in season.

I love tomatoes. They are my favourite food. But good grief there is some tasteless shit out there.

I only buy baby plum tomatoes and I don't put them in the fridge. They're lovely.

Yep. Tomatoes in fruit bowl, apples in the fridge.

One of the tastes I recall from my childhood - eating small warm tomatoes from straight off the vine in the old greenhouse at the back of the house. (Along with the tastes of fresh grown raspberries, strawberries etc......)

Second Sungold. I grow a number of varieties and that is the best, but I've never seen it in shops. Most of the standard shop ones are Moneymaker which taste of nothing even if you grow them yourself. Best shop ones are Piccolo - a red cherry tom variety. I've tried to find seeds for that but failed.

Commercially grown tomatoes are all texture and no taste any more.

I gave up on them. I live in Canada in the are where the majority of tomatoes are grown. In season, they are exceptionally inexpensive as a result.

I still grow my own. I dry or can them at the end of the season to have some year round (I know that doesn't help with tomatoes for a sandwich, though).

I have turned into a tomato snob.

Here you go.

Best shop ones are Piccolo - a red cherry tom variety. I've tried to find seeds for that but failed.

Open the tomato, take the seeds out, dry then and sow them.

I was told once (by an acquaintance who worked in a sewage plant) that tomato seeds are the only ones that regularly pass through the human body unscathed - so pop up every year at sewage works. I don't know how true that is but I'd guess the seeds are viable.

My DGF was a greengrocer and a nurseryman and had two large greenhouses full of tomatos and cucumbers. The smell in the greenhouse was amazing! I only have to a sniff of on the vine tomatoes to have the memories come back.
I go to Seven Sisters station a lot and there used to a huge tomato plant with tomatoes growing in the middle of the track, may have been birds pooing on the line or maybe someone throwing away a sandwich or something, it was a beautiful healthy plant considering it had trains thundering over it every 20 mins or so.

My sister grows the bestest tomatoes in the world. They are my favourite fruit and she always laughs at me for drooling 'but they taste like tomatoes...really tomatoey, like proper tomatoes...'. They are huge, red and juicy.

She keeps horses so maybe its the...poo? Wish I hadn't thought of that...

annadina

You're getting the tomatoes that you want. Shoppers pick the prettiest red, round blemish free fruit. So that's what supermarkets sell, so that's what growers grow. Looks and shelf life are way more important than taste, and it's all consumer led

Funnily enough, when we went shopping with our Dad, as youngsters, he would always tell us to buy "tomatoes that don't look like tomatoes" (basically as green as possible). But then he grew up in a village that made tomatoes. About 10 years ago he declared that shop tomatoes were shit (I may be paraphrasing ) and littered his patio with vines. Sadly we live 200 miles away, as MrsLH declared them the best she'd ever tasted.

Amazingly, he even got grapevines to take and flower . As he says "once a peasant, always a peasant".