Ingredient

Tomato

The tomato is the ingredient where the tinned version is regularly better than the fresh one, and knowing when is most of the skill. A pale February tomato has almost nothing in it; a tin of good plum tomatoes picked ripe has everything.

Why tinned is often better

Tomatoes for tinning are picked ripe, because they are processed within hours and do not need to survive a lorry and a shelf. Tomatoes for sale fresh are picked under-ripe so they arrive intact, and a tomato picked green never develops the sugars and aromatics of one ripened on the plant.

So the rule is about what the tomato is doing. If it is going to be cooked down into a sauce, a soup or a braise, use tinned unless your fresh tomatoes are genuinely in season and genuinely good. If it is going to be eaten raw — a salad, a bruschetta, a salsa — you need a good fresh one and there is no substitute.

The tomato products, and what each is for

Whole plum, tinned

The most useful. You control how broken down they get, and the quality is easier to judge than in a chopped tin.

Chopped, tinned

Convenient, often firmed with added calcium so the pieces stay in pieces — which is why some chopped tomatoes never quite break down.

Passata

Sieved raw tomatoes. Smooth, uncooked, thin. Good where you want tomato flavour with no texture.

Purée or paste

Concentrated and cooked. Intensely savoury but flat on its own. Fry it in the pan for a minute or two before adding liquid — this transforms it and is the step recipes most often omit.

Sun-dried

Chewy, sweet and salty. A seasoning, not a tomato.

Fresh, in season

Salads, and cooking where you want brightness rather than depth.

A basic tomato sauce

The version that improves everything it goes on, and takes about forty minutes of mostly leaving it alone.

1. Soften a chopped onion gently in olive oil for ten minutes or so, until sweet and translucent. Do not brown it hard.
2. Add sliced garlic and cook for under a minute, until it smells of garlic and no more.
3. Add a spoonful of tomato purée and fry it, stirring, for a minute or two until it darkens. This is the depth step.
4. Add a tin of whole plum tomatoes, crushing them with a spoon, and half a tin of water swilled round to get the rest out.
5. Season, and simmer uncovered for twenty-five to forty minutes until it no longer tastes raw and has visibly thickened.
6. Taste. If it is sharp, a pinch of sugar. If it is flat, salt and a splash of vinegar. Olive oil or butter stirred in off the heat at the end makes it glossy.

Handling fresh tomatoes

• Do not refrigerate them. Below about 12°C the aromatic compounds stop being produced and the texture goes mealy. The damage is partly permanent — a tomato that has been cold does not fully recover on the counter.
• Salt them and wait for salads. Ten minutes with salt draws out water and concentrates what is left.
• Peel by scoring a cross and dropping into boiling water for twenty to thirty seconds, then into cold. The skin slips off.
• Keep the seeds and jelly for cooking — that is where much of the savoury flavour is. Discard them only when texture matters, as in a tart.
• Ripen on the counter, stem side down, out of direct sun. A banana nearby speeds it up.

What to do with a glut, ripe or green

Both ends of the season have their own answer.

• A long-cooked sauce, reduced for an hour and frozen in portions. This is the best use of ripe fruit and the one most worth the pan space.
• Roasted slowly with garlic and oil, then blitzed or kept whole under oil.
• Red tomato chutney, which takes a long time because ripe tomatoes are almost entirely water.
• Green tomato chutney, which is the classic answer to a plant pulled up before the frost, and much quicker.
• Oven-dried halves, salted and dried slowly, then kept in oil.
• Frozen whole. Tomatoes freeze acceptably and the skins slip off as they thaw, which makes them ideal for a sauce later.

Common questions