Posted on 01/14/2008 8:44:44 AM PST by T-Bird45
The quest for the perfect tomato began in New Brunswick nearly 50 years ago and ended, for now, in a field south of Tel Aviv, Israel.
After eight years of taste tests from chefs and tomato lovers, agricultural scientists at Rutgers University say they have resurrected one of the most delicious Jersey tomatoes ever.
The elusive "Ramapo" tomato seed has been reproduced in Israel and 572,000 certified organic seeds were shipped this month to New Brunswick.
The Ramapo tomato, named after a New Jersey Indian tribe and developed at Rutgers in 1968, will be back for this summer's growing season after an absence of more 20 years.
In the Garden State, considered to produce some of the nation's best tomatoes, that's big news.
"People all across the land are frustrated with hard, cardboardy-tasting tomatoes," said Jack Rabin, associate director of the New Jersey agricultural experiment station at Rutgers. "Ramapo gives them something that's an alternative ... that captures that famous Jersey tomato taste."
Seed companies stopped producing the Ramapo decades ago because commercial farmers sought varieties that grew well in other regions, and the Ramapo did well mostly along the East Coast, Rabin said.
The first major release of more than 8,000 seed packets will be sold by Rutgers in a few weeks, initially to home gardeners like Edmund Ryan of Irasburg, Vt., who remembers first tasting the variety as a teenager from a neighbor in Red Bank.
"It was just the perfect Jersey tomato," said Ryan, 54, who recalled eating the tomatoes in a sandwich after football practice. "It's nice and tart and sweet but also just had a little extra that I can't explain."
Rutgers scientists have been busy pursuing that "holy grail" of productivity, good yield and taste in greenhouses and fields, experimenting with 154 varieties, with flavor as the most important characteristic.
Tomatoes have been an important crop in New Jersey for more than 100 years. Until the 1950s, many were grown for use in tomato products, including soup at the Campbell Soup Co., based in Camden, Rabin said.
After World War II, most of the large-scale commercial farms moved to warmer climates like Florida and California. What remains in New Jersey today are tomatoes for fresh use, at supermarkets, restaurants and farm stands.
In the 1960s, as transportation improved, breeders introduced new varieties to withstand the rigors of shipping from farm to supermarkets, often at the expense of flavor, Rabin said.
A new process also helped shipping: picking the tomatoes green and exposing them to ethylene gas to ripen and turn red to allow for longer transportation and shelf life, said Martha A. Mutschler, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell.
She said the problem in taste comes when the tomatoes are picked immature green, and they can't fully ripen.
"One reason tomatoes don't taste good is because they are picked too soon," she said. "Another reason is that people refrigerate them."
Of course, it's a matter of palate as well. Tomato lovers are passionate and often go without them during the winter, when in not season.
"The flavor is the most important thing, you know," said chef Andre Soltner, who sold his legendary New York restaurant, Lutece, and teaches at the French Culinary Institute in New York. "When I cannot get good tomatoes with flavor, I don't use them."
For Lucky Lee, co-owner of Lucky's Real Tomatoes in Brooklyn, N.Y., which trucks ripe tomatoes during the winter from Florida back to New York in a day's turnaround, good tomatoes are also a source of nostalgia.
"It reminds you of a different time, a more natural way of living before additives and chemicals were put in everything we eat to make it last longer," she said. "It's a simpler life, a nicer life."
This will be a big day for tomato lovers.
Paul Wigsten, Culinary Institute of AmericaThe Ramapo tomato has elicited that nostalgia on tomato message boards from gardeners clamoring for the seeds.
It will grow well in New Jersey, but in other Mid-Atlantic states too, said its developer, Bernard Pollack. He started working on it in 1960 and is now a retired professor of plant breeding and genetics living in California.
Because the variety is an "F-1" hybrid, gardeners cannot save the seeds and replant them, expecting to recapture the same Ramapo with sweet-acid flavor.
Instead, seeds must be pollinated by hand, usually by a seed company which does the labor-intensive work of crossing the two parent lines, Pollack said. The original "parents" were still at Rutgers.
The "Jersey Tomato working group" at Rutgers, made up of economists, breeders, horticulturists and plant pathologists and first convened in 2000, will present its findings about the Ramapo Tuesday in Atlantic City.
Once they decided to introduce the Ramapo, they found a seed company in Israel, which has a winter growing season, to replicate them at a good price, Rabin said. They will be distributed to home gardeners and later to some commercial farmers to test them.
"As word gets out about the particular Ramapo tomato, there's going to be a huge demand for it across the country," said Paul Wigsten, farm liaison and produce buyer for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Wigsten has never tasted a Ramapo, but has heard about the lore.
"This will be a big day for tomato lovers. It's real gratifying to see Rutgers concentrating more on flavor than on any other characteristic of the tomato," he said.
Home-grown tomatos, HELLMANS!
That would be Duke’s, down here in the south!
I have never tried lemon grass from seed. One year I was able to get it to overwinter, that was in Delaware, but I haven’t tried to do it here, I think I will this year instead of treating it as an annual.
I don’t have a greenhouse, so my front room basically turns into one starting early february, it has south and east facing windows and I have shelves built in an “L” across them.
I didn’t know about the fireants and the mint.........but I sure do know about escapee mint!!!
First time for us as well. I’ll let you know.
My hubby isn’t too crazy about houseplants so I try to keep them spread out—it minimizes the effect!
The mint is great—at least I think so! Every tiem the guys mow, that’s all you can smell!
I saw something about wanting a gardening list and someone on another thread (me) mentioned a fitness ping list/thread for people trying to slim down or tone up. Freepmail me with your ideas and/or to be added to one of the lists or to help me out a little (Diana in Wisconsin that was a hint). ;-)
Tomato Ping.
Fresh picked asparagus is a treat. Problem is, you have to find somewhere local to do it. The stuff in the stores? Yuck.
Same for oranges and grapefruit. We get some sent to us from a place in FL. I thought I hated citrus until I tried these. Tender, JUICY, full of flavor, not like the hard, dry, woody, flavorless stuff in the stores. Expensive, but we consider it well worth the price. It’s one of our splurges and if I can get mr. mm to eat fruit, I’ll go for it.
I'm down to 3 vine-ripeneds in my fridge so it's time. I panic when I'm down to my last tomato, and am spoiled on the vine-ripeneds and home grown, salt and 5 peppercorn blend, and I love to pop sweet grape toms as a snack. I could eat tomatoes three times a day--I'd even eat tomato pop-tarts or twinkies.
LOL! As long as they [grape tomatoes] have a crunch to them and they’re not soft/squishy....I’m with you! Give me tomatoes!
THANKS MUCH.
Sounds great!!
Could you please put me on the gardening list? I’ll contribute whatever I can, although I am an amateur gardener. I hit up Diana in Wisconsin for info every chance I can, since she is so knowledgeable.
Dang, I knew Diana and gardengirl would hit it off, they have SO much in common. Reading their posts will be valuable to folks just getting into gardening.
I added billhilly to this ping just in case he wants to grow some veggies in that rich Delta soil. That is, if he can find time from slaying crappie (grin).
Between this thread, and the stack of seed catalogs I have on my desk — I’m going crazy for REAL tomatoes!
I’ll start the list, but may have to call on others for some help here and there!
Yes, Diana is a wealth of information. In fact she was my inspiration to expand my garden and start selling not only the jellies I make from my peppers, but my produce as well.
LOL. You should go on tndeer.com, a deer hunting forum, and post that!!!
They have special sections on planting food plots for deer. Real scientific stuff.
The deer nibbled off my grean beans that grew outside the fence, so this coming season the beans are going to be put on the opposite side, where they can’t get to them.
Ping to posts starting at 165!!!
LOL!!!
The last thing I need is to attract anymore deer to my garden -— I need plants to keep them out because it is far too large to fence in.
Thanks for introducing us, girlangler!
Be more than glad to help! I do a gardening column for a local newspaper. Don’t know how much help it would be to anyone that lives anywhere but the south, but...
I ordered a plant a couple of years ago—supposed to be deer proof—some type of marigold that grows out west. It’s the stinkinest thing you can imagine. Sold some to a customer.
He agreed with me that it stank, came back and told me the deer were astraddle it that same night. Ate it to the ground!
I hate cardboard tomatoes (and cardboard cheese)
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