What Are Tomatoes and How Can I Use Them?

Tomato sauce  is any of a very large number of sauces made primarily from tomatoes, usually to be served as part of a dish (rather than as a condiment).

Tomato sauces are common for meat and vegetables, but they are perhaps best known as sauces for pasta dishes.

Tomatoes have a rich flavour, low liquid content, very soft flesh which breaks down easily, and the right composition to thicken into a sauce when they are cooked.

These qualities make them ideal for simple and appealing sauces.

The simplest tomato sauces consist just of chopped tomato flesh (with the skins and seeds optionally removed), cooked in a little olive oil and simmered until it loses its raw flavour, and seasoned with salt.

Water (or another, more flavourful liquid such as stock or wine) is often added to keep it from drying out too much. 

Onion and garlic are almost always sweated or sautéed at the beginning before the tomato is added.

Other seasonings typically include basil, oregano, parsley, and possibly some spicy red pepper or black pepper. Ground or chopped meat is also common.

Tomato paste is a thick paste made by adding sugar to ripened tomatoes with skin and seeds removed. Its most common culinary usage is to enrich the flavor of sauces, particularly tomato sauce. It is most commonly available in tin cans and squeeze tubes.

It was traditionally made in parts of Sicily, Southern Italy and Malta by spreading out a much reduced tomato sauce on wooden boards. The boards are set outdoors under the hot August sun to dry the paste until it is thick enough, when scraped up, to hold together in a richly colored dark ball.

Today this artisan product is harder to find than the industrial (much thinner) version.

Canned tomatoes are the workhorse of any real pantry. They are ripe tomatoes peeled and sealed in their own juice, picked and packed at the height of summer, which is exactly why they beat the pale, hard tomatoes most stores sell in January.

For nine months of the year, a can of good tomatoes tastes more like a tomato than the fresh ones on the shelf. That is not a compromise. It is the better choice for any dish that gets cooked down.

Plum tomatoes do most of the canning because they hold more flesh and less water than a round slicer, so the can is meatier and the sauce thicker.

Sundried tomatoes are ripe tomatoes that have had nearly all their water removed, leaving chewy, leathery pieces packed with concentrated sweetness and a deep savory punch. Drying turns the tomato's natural sugars and glutamates into something far more intense than the fresh fruit ever tastes.

You will find them two ways on the shelf. Dry-packed versions come loose in a bag and feel firm and slightly brittle. Oil-packed versions sit in a jar of olive oil, already soft and ready to eat, often with garlic or herbs added.

That single difference in packing changes how you cook with them more than anything else about the ingredient.

Tomato juice  is the juice from skinless tomatoes. It is usually used as a beverage, either plain or in cocktails such as a Bloody Mary.

Many commercial manufacturers of tomato juice also add significant amounts of salt so be certain to check the nutrition facts if you are on a sodium restricted diet.

Other ingredients are also often added, such as onion powder, garlic powder, other spices and even clam juice. These tomato juice based, vegetable juice cocktails are popular for use in a variety of mixed drinks. One popular brand of this tomato juice mixture is Clamato, click here for a list of varieties. The tomato juice known to most people is always boiled and thus is not available as a fresh product.

A recent small scale study has indicated that tomato juice contains a factor (dubbed P3) that inhibits platelets in blood from clumping together and forming blood clots. The authors suggest this might be beneficial to diabetes sufferers. The actual effect of increased intake of tomato juice by diabetics has never been studied.

Tomato juice also contains the antioxidant lycopene**.

Scientific studies have suggested that lycopene consumption may protect against prostate cancer, breast cancer, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease. Epidemiological research has also shown that lycopene may also protect against breast cancer and myocardial infarction (heart attack).

You can buy a large variety of tomato juice online

Tomato purée, sometimes know as "Passata" is a thick paste that is made from strained tomatoes and especially used in Italian cooking.

The definitions of tomato purée vary between regions. In the USA, tomato purée is a processed food product, usually consisting of only tomatoes, but can also be found in pre-seasoned form. It differs from tomato sauce or tomato paste in consistency and content. Tomato puree generally lacks the additives common to a complete tomato sauce, and does not have the thicknesss of paste.

To prepare tomato purée, ripe tomatoes are washed and the leaves and stem are removed. Some processors remove the skin of the tomato as well. This is then mashed or mechanically chopped to the desired consistency.

Tomato purée can be used in soups, stews, sauces, or any other dish where the tomato flavor is desired, but not the texture. It is often deprecated by professional chefs, who find it to have an overly cooked flavor compared to other forms of canned tomatoes. This is sometimes a non-issue, as in long-cooked dishes, but in quick sauces such as a marinara sauce it is undesirable.

Green tomatoes are simply unripe tomatoes, picked while the fruit is still hard and the flesh is firm and tart, almost crisp like an apple. They are not a separate variety; they are the same red tomatoes you know, caught before the sugars develop.

Bite into one raw and you get bright acidity with very little sweetness, plus a dense flesh that holds its shape under heat. That firmness is exactly why cooks reach for them.

Do not confuse them with tomatillos, the husk-wrapped fruit used in salsa verde. Those are a different plant entirely.

Beefsteak tomatoes are the big, meaty slicers, the ones that can run wider than your palm and weigh a pound apiece. One thick slice covers a whole sandwich or a burger, which is exactly what they are for.

Cut one open and you see why cooks love them: thick walls, a dense and juicy interior, and small seed pockets. The flesh is mild and sweet, and the texture is solid enough to hold a clean slice without falling apart.

This is a tomato at its best raw and fully ripe. Cook it down and you waste what you paid for.

Yellow tomatoes are golden-skinned varieties that ripen sunny instead of red. They run milder and a little sweeter, with lower acidity, so they taste rounder and less sharp than a typical red.

That gentler acidity makes them a salad tomato first. Slice them raw where their color and softer bite carry the plate, as in a Caprese Salad or a Three Tomato Salad alongside reds for contrast.

They also turn a tomato dish a striking gold. A Gazpacho Blond and a Cheesy Red & Yellow Tomato Pie both trade on that color you cannot get from a red tomato.

For the broad how-to on selecting and storing, see tomatoes.

This is a loose label, not a single variety. In recipes it usually means either fresh tomatoes for Mexican cooking or, more often, canned tomatoes already mixed with green chiles and seasoning.

So read the recipe before you shop. If it wants the seasoned canned kind, a can of tomatoes with chiles brings built-in heat to a pot of Uncle Roy's Chili or Very Veggie Chili. If it just means tomatoes for a Mexican dish, plain ones work fine.

For how to pick ripe ones and store them, see tomatoes.