Your "Best Tasting Tomato" for 2023

[WoodSprite]

Margaret Curtain is my favorite slicing tomato this year. That's compared to 6 other black/dark varieties & 1 pink variety.

Cow's Tit is my favorite paste tomato this year. That's compared to 4 other large-fruited paste varieties.

I quit growing cherry tomatoes. I prefer slicers and paste.

[habitat-gardener]

In my garden this year, Rosella cherry tastes better than Black Cherry. Rosella is about half the size of BC and at least 4 times as productive.

Best tasting this year is Green Tiger.

[Moth1992]

Its the first year i actually have a proper garden plot and my growing conditions are not very tomato friendly. Of the varieties I tried:

Maglia rosa best cherry, gave me like 4-5kg of candy.

Kimberly best early tomato. Nice classic tomato.

Black beauty best late tomato flavour but very closely followed by brown sugar. Brown sugar has less umami but is way easier to harvest so overall I give it my win.

Also, I think i need to accept im not an orange tomato person and stop trying them. I dont like sungold or jaune flamme.

[WoodSprite]

Also, I think i need to accept im not an orange tomato person and stop trying them. I dont like sungold or jaune flamme.

I wonder if you could be picking them too soon? Let them get soft, not just gold/orange, and see if that changes your mind. Jaune Flamme is one of my favorite tomato varieties.

[JRinPA]

comparing Cherry tomatoes to real tomatoes?

I mean, I guess they are tomatoes, but if you can't slice it and put it on a sandwich...does it really matter?

Now I am wondering how a mashed up sweet ozark orange and a two handfuls of sunsugar would compare in taste. I just had three excellent tomatoes last night. A stump, and SOO, and a cuostralee, picked after dark at the garden. But I didn't bother to pick the dozens or hundreds of ripe sunsugar and sungold ripe at my driveway. They just don't count when it comes to the real work of sandwich construction.

[karstopography]

Cherry tomatoes should have their own category.

[Shule]

Carolina Yellow, followed closely by Cilantrovaya_B. Everyone who tasted Cilantrovaya_B was impressed (at every point in the season). I'm the only who has tried Carolina Yellow, though.

One really cool thing about Cilantrovaya_B is that the outside of the skin is sweet.

[Reds145]

New here and don’t post much .

For me this year it was Cherokee purple followed by a close second dwarf mahogany, then caspian pink .

[Yak54]

New here and don’t post much .

For me this year it was Cherokee purple followed by a close second dwarf mahogany, then caspian pink .

I remember Caspian Pink from 20 years ago and I liked the taste very much.

[Reds145]

New here and don’t post much .

For me this year it was Cherokee purple followed by a close second dwarf mahogany, then caspian pink .

I remember Caspian Pink from 20 years ago and I liked the taste very much.

Very good tomato I liked it a lot

[DriftlessRoots]

Did a tasting of only 19 varieties with a half dozen friends and Stump of the World was a clear winner. For me personally I have fallen in love with the wee Gardener’s Sweetheart.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Did a tasting of only 19 varieties with a half dozen friends and Stump of the World was a clear winner.

Not planting any SOTW this year goes in the MINUS column!

The Gotch

[CrazyAboutOrchids]

Best tasting.... Karen Oliver's Cowboy

Most Productive.... GGWT, still spitting them out

Most impressive.... a paste I was graciously given seeds for.... Pomodoro Cuore Antico di Aqui Terme - the most massive paste I've ever grown. I have seeds from a friend of a paste that supposedly came over from Italy with her husband's mother's family that I have grown every year; PCAdAT blew it away.

[zeuspaul]

I grow the tomatoes and my better half prepares the meals. She has a bunch to choose from sitting on the counter. The ones she asks for more of are the *grape* tomatoes which she uses in our salads. So these *grape* tomatoes are salad tomatoes, AKA black cherry.

[Labradors]

Also, I think i need to accept im not an orange tomato person and stop trying them. I dont like sungold or jaune flamme.

I wonder if you could be picking them too soon? Let them get soft, not just gold/orange, and see if that changes your mind. Jaune Flamme is one of my favorite tomato varieties.

I think that Sungold needs to be vine-ripened (at least for me). I too had a bad experience with Jaune Flamme. I prefer "sweet" with a complex flavour to "tart".

Linda

[karstopography]

In my experience, Sungold can be a delicious tomato, but there’s a lot of ifs with Sungold. Did I pick it at the right moment of ripeness, did I get to it before it split, did a leaf footed bug get to it first, did it rain a bunch before I picked it. Sungold isn’t the toughest plant in the face of fungal issues either.

Sungold seems to be like a lot but not all of cherry tomatoes in that it doesn’t ripen all that well off the vine and is very prone to splitting where I am. Bugs seem drawn to sungold over other varieties. And sungold is overly sensitive to water inputs, rain or irrigation water.

I don’t know what percentage of sungold tomatoes I actually get to enjoy, but it is pretty low.

[Wildcat82]

comparing Cherry tomatoes to real tomatoes?

I mean, I guess they are tomatoes, but if you can't slice it and put it on a sandwich...does it really matter?

I've pretty much given up trying to grow slicers but it's really not that big a deal. I'll make a bacon and lettuce sandwich and toss a handfull of Black Cherry/Sun Gold in my mouth while eating. Doesn't get any better.

[Wildcat82]

In my experience, Sungold can be a delicious tomato, but there’s a lot of ifs with Sungold. Did I pick it at the right moment of ripeness, did I get to it before it split, did a leaf footed bug get to it first, did it rain a bunch before I picked it. Sungold isn’t the toughest plant in the face of fungal issues either.

Sungold seems to be like a lot but not all of cherry tomatoes in that it doesn’t ripen all that well off the vine and is very prone to splitting where I am. Bugs seem drawn to sungold over other varieties. And sungold is overly sensitive to water inputs, rain or irrigation water.

I don’t know what percentage of sungold tomatoes I actually get to enjoy, but it is pretty low.

I love the taste of Sungold but this might be the last year I grow it. My biggest problem with Sungold is that the fruit I get in my garden are always so darned small, not much bigger than Coyote. Black Cherry is normally twice as big and tastes just as good.

[JRinPA]

I tried black cherry a few times, it just never did well. Sungold are a little smaller on average than sunsugar for me, but the sungold get the thicker skin that won't stretch so they crack more as soon as they get wet.

[maxjohnson]

It's interesting that I grew Black Cherry in South Florida when I was relatively new to gardening, in root knot nematode soil. It was one of the best performer and produces loads. Because of the heat the fruit became very dark and sometimes is intensely sweet.

I never gotten as much success growing it in zone 6a, the fruits doesn't get as dark, not as sweet, and generally not as productive. Part of it is my fault, but I believe some variety perform better for certain climate, and this might be the case for Black Cherry. Which is why I haven't grown it for a couple years.

There are some variation in genetic for this variety because Bonnie Plant's version of Black Cherry is not like mine.