How To Choose A Sweet Tomato - And Why You Must NEVER Refrigerate IT

📖 Get my book "Annie's Amish Kitchen Wisdom" — 66 plain methods, every saving backed by real prices: https://amishkitchenwisdom.com It is the heart of summer. You bring home the prettiest tomatoes you can find, and like a careful soul, you put them straight in the ice box to keep. Three days later you slice one and something is wrong. The flesh is dry and woolly, mealy on the tongue, and the bright tomato taste you were after is simply gone — flat, like eating wet cardboard. The stand did nothing wrong. The season did nothing wrong. The ruin happened in your own kitchen, the moment that tomato went into the cold. My name is Annie Stoltzfus. I am Amish, from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, and I have grown, chosen, and put up tomatoes my whole life — the way my mother taught me, and her mother taught her. Today I will show you four plain tests for choosing a sweet tomato, and the one thing you must never do to it once it is yours. The first test is the nose. Smell the tomato at the stem end, where it grew on the vine. A good tomato tells you it is good before you ever bite it — it smells of tomato, earthy and green and sweet. A tomato with no smell will taste of nothing at all. The second is the feel. A ripe tomato should give just a little under the softest press — yielding, but not soft, not squishy. Hard as a ball means picked too green. Mushy means it has gone too far. The third is the weight. The better tomato feels heavy for its size, full of juice and flesh. A light tomato has dried out or was never properly filled. The fourth is the look — and here let me set you free of a common mistake. The sweetest tomatoes often have small honest cracks near the stem, what the old folks called growth cracks. They are the sign of a tomato that ripened full and fast in the sun. Do not pass over a good tomato for a small honest crack. And then: never put it in the refrigerator. The cold breaks down the soft juicy structure of the flesh, turning it dry and grainy and woolly. Worse, it halts the very things in the tomato that give it its smell and sweetness — and once they are stopped by the cold, they do not come back, not even when you let it warm again. On the counter, stem side down, away from direct sun. That is where a tomato belongs. There is no money in teaching you this. The store keeps their tomatoes cold and hard for shipping, which is the very reason the store tomato so seldom tastes of anything. So nobody reminded you. So I am reminding you.