What is your top 10 best tasting tomatoes, in your opinion? I am wondering about taste only, no other features. Obviously your answers are going to be subjective based on your preferences and growing conditions.

I don't have a top 10 per se but every year Sungold and Black Cherry are in a class by themselves. Pretty much all the rest of the varieties I've tried fall into the "very good but not spectacular" category.

First, there are probably 20,000 tomato variety out there now. Many new variety coming out so the genetic keeps getting better. There are probably a bunch out there that both taste amazing and has good yield, I simply can't keep up.

It's not just growing condition, but also climate. Black Cherry in particular is extremely sweet when I grew it in zone 10, but in zone 6 it doesn't taste special and the fruit doesn't get very dark as it should be. Different weather each year will result in better or worse taste, even if you fertilize well. With optimal condition, even some variety not known for its taste can produce some exceptionally sweet fruits.

Best tasting doesn't always equate to satisfaction because some of them can be harder to grow, has poorer disease resistance, or offer lower yield, or in the chase of cherries they crack too easy from the rain. Out of my list below, the only two variety that I actually am willing to grow regularly are Curtis Cheek and Green Giant, and maybe Lemon Drop. I tend to skip the others despite how good they taste.

If you want the highest brix cherries, it's Ambrosia Orange UBX and Nectar F1.

Beefsteaks:
Brandywine Sudduth's Strain - most complex, hard to grow, low yield
Copper River - sweet, but need sun and dry condition, probably disease prone
Curtis Cheek - sweet, very smooth with lots of gel
Green Giant - refreshing, all around good (potentially getting replaced by Queen Aliquippa)
Opalka - not so much the taste, but something amazing about the texture that melts in your mouth
Paul Robeson - one of the best tasting purple tomato (not blue), sweet, dark, and complex, hard to grow, disease prone, low yield

Cherry
Ambrosia Orange UBX - high brix, cracks easy
Black Cherry - need lots of sun to develop flavor
Lemon Drop - can get very sweet with lots of sun
Sungold F1 - sweet and complex, cracks easy
Nectar F1 - high brix, but more one note and less complex than sungold

These are my current top 10. It's likely that other varieties will change this list as I try more over the years.

In no particular order:

Cherokee Purple Heart (I believe the taste is the same as Cherokee Purple, I'm just partial to the heart variant because it's meatier)
Golden Fang
Pink Giant Ukrainian
Desperado
Maglia Rosa
Violet Heat
Midnight Sun
Sun Gold
Sioux Empire Paste
Copper River

1. Aunt Ginny's Purple
2. Stump Of The World
3. Seek-No-Further Love Apple
4. Rose
5. Prudence (Pruden's) Purple
6. Marianna's Peace
7. Dester
8. Earl's Faux
9. SunGold F1
10. Brandywine Sudduth, which can be number 1 or number 1,000, depending on the weather.

It's all pink beefsteaks and SunGold, for me.

There are likely another 50 to 100 pink beefsteaks, several hearts (of different colors), and a very few red, or gold/orange, beefsteaks that are slightly outside of a top 10.

Tormato,

I would appreciate any comments you may have regarding yield for your listed 1-8. During my limited experience, I have grown 4 on your list of 1-8 and have had the best yield with Dester.

Traveler wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 11:25 pm Tormato,

I would appreciate any comments you may have regarding yield for your listed 1-8. During my limited experience, I have grown 4 on your list of 1-8 and have had the best yield with Dester.

I keep refining my methods in an attempt to maximize flavor from my tomatoes. It involves the hypothesis that the smaller the root ball, the less excessive rain will be absorbed by the plant. Starting seedlings in narrow 9 oz red plastic cups, planting vertical rather than somewhat horizontal, limiting watering to about every 4 1/2 days, has achieved my goal. But, production has suffered.

For the past few years, I'll get one or two of the first trusses to produce perhaps half a dozen tomatoes, then the plants mostly shut down until late in the year, then picking up again just before the season is over. I believe there might be an imbalance of early fruit putting energy into producing seeds, and the small root ball. This year, I likely will experiment with some plants, by removing, at least, the first truss.

As for the normal growing of plants, Stump Of The World has had the best production, for me.

Maglia Rosa
Blush
Orange Strawberry
Rose
Bulgarian Triumph
EM Champion
Little Lucky
Pink Princess
Prudens Purple
Pink Berkely Tie Die

I forgot Prairie Fire, an elongated cherry that does well in a cage.

Daniel Burson
Solar Flare
Maglia Rosa
Noir Charbboneuse
Cowboy
Green Bee
Vorlon
KBX
Green Gables
Girl Girl’s Weird Thing

Brandywine Cowlick’s
Pruden’s Purple
Red Barn
Cuostralee
Black Krim
Dester
Bear Creek
Carbon
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Stump of the World

Marianna's Peace (absolute tops!)

Rinaldo (a large plum with just enough sweetness and complexity to make the best sauce!)

Yellow Brandywine (You'll need to sit down eating this tomato, hits all the right notes, swooning)

Goose Creek (the best tasting tomato I EVER had!)

Mortgage Lifter (never disappoints, with flavor that makes a BLT an experience!)

Justine Heart (sweetness, not like Pineapple tomato sweet, but it makes the flavor stand out)

Pineapple (lush, sweet, juicy)

Black From Tula (the best tasting black there is!)

Joe's Plum (need seeds) (more tomatoes than I could handle, a lot of times I ate them right out in the garden, oxhearts)

Dagestanskiy (need seeds) (like an oxheart, fantastic flavor and as you see I never thought to save seed because I could order from Tatiana and now she's out of business)

Here in Northern California, I've tried a little over 50 varieties in the past decade. Here are the top performers:
#1 best flavor and performer= the late Fred Hempel's aji red F1 (note: the F2 and F3, while not stable, all have the same flavor as the F1)

Aji Red is the saladette sized tomatoes, about 5 plants all to the right. Lucky aji is in the picture and tastes amazing as well, but like it's parent, lucky tiger, it's extremely disease prone and very susceptible to nematodes. Also shown is cherokee purple and Sebastopol Cherry. When disease came through late in the season, the only one to fight it off was Aji red, everything else perished:

Here are some other standouts in no particular order:
1) 5 star grape F1
2) cherry bomb F1
3) Brad's atomic Grape
4) dark galaxy
5) cherokee purple (neighbor grew it, I can't ever get these to taste good under my care despite water stress, full sun, etc)

I think these lists are pretty arbitrary and completely depend on how they're grown, where they're grown, and what the particular growers like. I personally like depth of flavor and high sugar content.

Top 1, Big Beef.

Along the lines of being a goose, every year seems to have a new top ten lineup. Over the past twenty-five years the top ten will have had more than a hundred varieties in it. Maybe this year a few of the most popular will break into the “all time top ten” or maybe there will be a 2024 top ten contender. If a top ten list got started right now it would end up waaay too long.

I think my top ten list changes pretty much every time I think about it, but here's where it stands today. The ones with a * haven't produced much for me, but I keep trying because they're delicious.

My top 10 non-cherry for taste:
Bolgarskoe Chudo
Polish (Elles)
Rebel Yell
Blue Ridge Mountain*
Pineapple*
Oaxacan Jewel
Orange Banana
Summer Cider
Kellogg's Breakfast
Cherokee Carbon

My top 10 cherries for taste:
Sungold
Garnet
Rosella
Dikovinka
Super Snow White
Braveheart
Der Kleine Doctor
Volunteer pink cherry in last year's garden
Fruit Punch
Super Sweet 100

Let's see if I can actually list only 10. No particular order:

Brandywine Sudduth
KBX
Aunt Ginny's Purple
Absinthe
Marlowe Charleston
Vorlon
Buckeye Yellow
Cuostralee
Stump of the World
Grandma Oliver's Chocolate

Tormato wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2024 9:36 am

Traveler wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 11:25 pm Tormato,

I would appreciate any comments you may have regarding yield for your listed 1-8. During my limited experience, I have grown 4 on your list of 1-8 and have had the best yield with Dester.

I keep refining my methods in an attempt to maximize flavor from my tomatoes. It involves the hypothesis that the smaller the root ball, the less excessive rain will be absorbed by the plant. Starting seedlings in narrow 9 oz red plastic cups, planting vertical rather than somewhat horizontal, limiting watering to about every 4 1/2 days, has achieved my goal. But, production has suffered.

For the past few years, I'll get one or two of the first trusses to produce perhaps half a dozen tomatoes, then the plants mostly shut down until late in the year, then picking up again just before the season is over. I believe there might be an imbalance of early fruit putting energy into producing seeds, and the small root ball. This year, I likely will experiment with some plants, by removing, at least, the first truss.

As for the normal growing of plants, Stump Of The World has had the best production, for me.

I agree that the taste of a tomato depends on how much water the plant can take. In various discussions, I read that if the water for watering has a higher conductivity (approx. 4 µS ), the roots are able to take in less water and this should improve the taste and also the sweetness of the fruits. For this year, I have prepared such a test, I will water one tomato with untreated water and the other with water with potassium salt, which I will adjust the conductivity to the required 4 µS . To assess the taste, I will use the whole family and I will also measure the Brix value.

Tormato wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 2:23 pm 1. Aunt Ginny's Purple
2. Stump Of The World
3. Seek-No-Further Love Apple
4. Rose
5. Prudence (Pruden's) Purple
6. Marianna's Peace
7. Dester
8. Earl's Faux
9. SunGold F1
10. Brandywine Sudduth, which can be number 1 or number 1,000, depending on the weather.

It's all pink beefsteaks and SunGold, for me.

There are likely another 50 to 100 pink beefsteaks, several hearts (of different colors), and a very few red, or gold/orange, beefsteaks that are slightly outside of a top 10.

Interesting list! What will work best in the cold Wisconsin Midwest?

bboomer wrote: ↑Sat Jun 22, 2024 7:47 pm

Tormato wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 2:23 pm 1. Aunt Ginny's Purple
2. Stump Of The World
3. Seek-No-Further Love Apple
4. Rose
5. Prudence (Pruden's) Purple
6. Marianna's Peace
7. Dester
8. Earl's Faux
9. SunGold F1
10. Brandywine Sudduth, which can be number 1 or number 1,000, depending on the weather.

It's all pink beefsteaks and SunGold, for me.

There are likely another 50 to 100 pink beefsteaks, several hearts (of different colors), and a very few red, or gold/orange, beefsteaks that are slightly outside of a top 10.

Interesting list! What will work best in the cold Wisconsin Midwest?

I have no idea. Other Wisconsinites, here, might.

To me, the benchmark against what all other tomatoes are to be judged, is Stump Of The World.

Wisconsin you say. My list of favorites that I have grown in SE Wisconsin is longer than 10.

Brandywine
Dester
Cherokee Purple
Brandywine from Croatia
Elgin Pink
Stump of the World
Rebel Yell
Rose
Marianna's Peace
Daniel Burson
Black Krim
Terhune
Winsall
Polish C
Barlow Jap
Sakharnyi Pudviochok
Black Cherry
SunGold
SunSugar