Look For These Features When Choosing Tomatoes For Sauce

If you're looking to make tomato sauce from scratch, you obviously have to focus on your tomato situation first. Now, a lot of the time people will recommend you use canned tomatoes, specifically whole canned tomatoes, as they tend to cook down more easily than the crushed or diced versions. But what if you want to make use of fresh tomatoes? What should you do then? We talked to Matt Harding, chief innovation officer at Piada Italian Street Food, and he gave us the skinny on how to pick the best ones.

"Look for fruits that are heavy for their size and are firm," Harding said, giving some solid guidance for the next time you visit your farmer's market. He warned against picking just any beautiful-looking tomato, though. "Some types of tomatoes, like certain types of multi-colored tomatoes, look beautiful, are super juicy, and eat amazing, but will make a sauce that is thin, watery, and less flavored," he said, although he conceded that these tomatoes "oven roast as thin slices very well." If you decide to do that, though, make sure you know how to slice tomatoes like a professional first.

Something else you should consider before adding fresh tomatoes to your sauce is the seed situation. "I tend to pick fruit that has a thicker wall and smaller seed ratio, as fully ripe as possible but do not add any overripe fruit," said Matt Harding. Furthermore, although tomato seeds are not poisonous, despite what some people in the past believed about the fruit, they can affect the flavor of the tomato — and the subsequent sauce. While you can add umami-packed boosters like Marmite to affect the flavor of the sauce in a considerably more pleasant way, it's always best to begin with tasty tomatoes in the first place.

Harding suggested that you taste your seeds, just to be sure nothing is getting introduced into the sauce that you don't want to be there. "I've used certain varieties of cherry tomatoes before that their seeds are incredibly bitter and after you cook them that flavor only amplifies and becomes not good," he said. If that is the case, Harding added that on occasion he has "snuck super sweet and juicy tomatoes in with the workhorses" in order to make his bitter-tasting sauce a little more sweet and mellow. If you want to brighten it up, you can always add some yellow tomatoes for a sweet, low-acid sauce.