Tomato Frenzy: Harvesting and Using All Those Ripe Tomatoes
By the lamplit stall
I loitered,
feasting
my eyes
On colours
ripe and rich
for the heart's desire-
Tomatoes,
redder than Krakatoa's
fire....
--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (from FoodTales: Tomatoes).
If your garden has gone well this year, you're already enjoying ripe, rich tomatoes "redder than Krakatoa's fire", as Wilfrid Wilson Gibson described them. Ah, the pleasure of plucking a sweet, fully red tomato right off the vine! The world would truly be an Eden if we could stroll through our gardens every day of the year and pick the fully-ripened tomatoes we wanted to eat that day.
Unfortunately, summer's drawing to a close, and if, like me, you always grow extra tomato plants just in case, you're rapidly approaching the point where you have to take a bushel basket with you on your daily stroll to collect all the fruit that needs to be harvested RIGHT NOW. And if you live north of the Lower Mainland, you're already anxiously eyeing the green fruits and wondering just how long the frost will hold off. Tomato frenzy is upon us, those days of checking the weather reports repeatedly throughout the day, piling baskets of fresh tomatoes in our kitchens, and madly searching for yet more tomato recipes to use up our overly-abundant supply.
Fortunately, tomatoes are an incredibly versatile fruit and add a colorful, tasty touch to an astonishing range of dishes. And while nothing beats the flavour of fresh-picked tomatoes in my opinion, they can also be processed in a variety of ways and used throughout the winter.
Harvesting and Storing Tomatoes
First, the basics. Can you pick green tomatoes? That depends on how green they are. The fruit has to be "hard green" to ripen off the vine. This is why not all the green tomatoes you hurriedly harvest at the end of the season and wrap in newspaper ripen; some of them are just too immature. It's only the "hard green" ones that will turn red and provide you with red,"fresh" tomatoes for several more weeks.As Jackie Bantle explains in "Summertime Tomato Care (Part 2)", (1995), the true test of tomato maturity is the "breaker stage", indicated by the appearance of any pink or red colour on the fruit. Once this has occurred, the chemical actions associated with ripening have already begun, so if you pick it, the tomato will ripen naturally and be just as red and sweet as a tomato ripened on the vine.
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