The Best Tomato Varieties for Sauces
It takes a variety of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) different from slicing, cherry or beefsteak tomatoes to produce a smooth, rich tomato sauce. What`s needed is a tomato with firm, meaty flesh, very little juice and few seeds. Called sauce or paste tomatoes, they have rich, complex flavors and cook down to make sauces and pastes more quickly than other varieties. Tomatoes are tender perennial plants native to Central and South America and hardy in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 10 through 11. They`re grown as annual plants.
Many varieties of paste tomatoes are small to medium in size. Some cultivars are double these sizes or larger, making them the best choices for sauce because they still have great flavor but take less work to process. They`re good to eat fresh as well. Plum-shaped "Big Mama" has tomatoes 5 inches long by 3 inches wide. The plants bear mature fruit in 80 days. Measuring in at 4 to 6 inches long, "Jersey Giant Paste" ripens in 85 days, producing red, elongate, pointed-end tomatoes with a sweet taste. Both these varieties are indeterminate plants, meaning the tomatoes grow and produce fruit until killed by frost. Vining, indeterminate plants need support.
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To get an early start on sauce making, it`s best to choose determinate tomato varieties with great production and taste. Determinate tomatoes are bushy types that don`t need staking. The plants stop growing when fruits begin to form on the branches, so one large crop of tomatoes ripen all at once. "Bellstar" delivers 4- to 5-ounce red, pear-shaped fruit in 70 days. Also ripening in 70 days and with the advantage of good disease resistance, "Mariana" VFFNA hybrid have red fruit with an elongated shape. The initials tell you it`s resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt races 1 and 2, nematodes and alternaria.
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Working over centuries to perfect tomatoes for the sauces Italy is famous for, Italian plant breeders produced cultivars that are still among the best-tasting ever for sauces. Heirloom "San Marzano" is the traditional sauce tomato for Italy, developed in the Naples area. Indeterminate plants produce 2-ounce, elongated -- almost cylindrical -- red fruit in 80 days. They have a rich, complex flavor, very meaty flesh, small seed cavity and almost no seeds. Indeterminate "San Marzano Redorta" has larger 8-ounce fruits in 78 days. "Roma" is also a famous Italian paste tomato, good for sauces and eating fresh. It`s available as a determinate, bushy, disease-resistant variety, "Roma VF," with 3-inch red fruits.
After tomatoes were introduced to Europe by New World Spanish explorers in the 1500s, many cultures bred them to develop good sauce tomatoes. Some of the best European sauce varieties are indeterminate and include Polish heirloom "Opalka," with meaty, sweet flesh, thin skin and an elongate shape to 6 inches long. "Hungarian Italian" pear-shaped paste tomatoes ripen in 80 days on large, productive plants. Now an essential ingredient in many Hungarian dishes, tomatoes probably came to Hungary with the Turks, who invaded that area in the 1500s.
