Denise and Lindsay's Iris
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Monday, March 3, 2014
GARDENBEAR ORGANIC: MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR TOMATOES
GARDENBEAR ORGANIC: MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR TOMATOES: We humans have shaped our foods. Ever since agriculture was invented, we started saving the seeds from the biggest, and the sweetest, and ...
MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR TOMATOES
We humans have shaped our foods. Ever since agriculture was invented, we started saving the seeds from the biggest, and the sweetest, and the easiest to eat fruits and vegetables, not only for convenience, but also for our addiction to sugar. This article is about Tomatoes, Where they come from, what we've done to them, how they're valuable to us, how to store them, and how to get the most nutrition from them:
Tomatoes. Most popular vegetable, next to potatoes. We eat an average of just under a hundred pounds per year, each person in America...
They came from South america, originally. Not those mammoth, luscious thick vines that have to be staked up and thinned. No. Long, stringy, whispy stems with small leaves, and tiny, tiny berries. You'd have to eat over 400 of them to equal the volume of a beefsteak tomato. But don't be fooled. Ounce, for ounce, those itsy bitsy berries have up to 40 times more Lycopene than your meaty Beefsteak. Each one is a miniature tomato 'pop-tart' of flavor. Not so easy for harvest, or slicing, however. Hence, the hand of man intervenes, for convenience. Nowadays, there's tomatoes whose skin is as tough as shoe in order to make them easy to pic with a machine. And they're as tasty as paper. (That's probably because they were harvested green and shipped sometimes thousands of miles. Of course, it had to be picked at the 'breaker' stage, just a blush of color, or else they would never turn red. Now they're shipped to warehouses where they're bombarded with ethyline gas to control the exact date of readiness. Well, not really readiness, but a time at which consumers are are prepared to plop them into a bag and take them home. Of course, there's the 'on-the-vine, or cluster tomatoes. It's logical to assume they're field-ripened. Not so...They ripen in storage, too. Yuck.
Grow your own. Harvest them ripe. By the way, here's a few factoids:
1) Cherry tomatoes are higher in lycopene than large red tomatoes And the smaller, the better. Current-sized tomatoes are the most nutritious fresh tomato you can grow.
2)Red has more lycopene than any other color tomato
3) Canned tomatoes, particularly paste, have the highest concentration of lycopene of all tomato products. and cooking tomatoes makes their nutrients more available.
4) Store them at room temperature.
5) use the skin, juice and seeds whenever possible. These are the most nutritious parts.
I'll tell you food factoids in future blog posts.
Tomatoes. Most popular vegetable, next to potatoes. We eat an average of just under a hundred pounds per year, each person in America...
They came from South america, originally. Not those mammoth, luscious thick vines that have to be staked up and thinned. No. Long, stringy, whispy stems with small leaves, and tiny, tiny berries. You'd have to eat over 400 of them to equal the volume of a beefsteak tomato. But don't be fooled. Ounce, for ounce, those itsy bitsy berries have up to 40 times more Lycopene than your meaty Beefsteak. Each one is a miniature tomato 'pop-tart' of flavor. Not so easy for harvest, or slicing, however. Hence, the hand of man intervenes, for convenience. Nowadays, there's tomatoes whose skin is as tough as shoe in order to make them easy to pic with a machine. And they're as tasty as paper. (That's probably because they were harvested green and shipped sometimes thousands of miles. Of course, it had to be picked at the 'breaker' stage, just a blush of color, or else they would never turn red. Now they're shipped to warehouses where they're bombarded with ethyline gas to control the exact date of readiness. Well, not really readiness, but a time at which consumers are are prepared to plop them into a bag and take them home. Of course, there's the 'on-the-vine, or cluster tomatoes. It's logical to assume they're field-ripened. Not so...They ripen in storage, too. Yuck.
Grow your own. Harvest them ripe. By the way, here's a few factoids:
1) Cherry tomatoes are higher in lycopene than large red tomatoes And the smaller, the better. Current-sized tomatoes are the most nutritious fresh tomato you can grow.
2)Red has more lycopene than any other color tomato
3) Canned tomatoes, particularly paste, have the highest concentration of lycopene of all tomato products. and cooking tomatoes makes their nutrients more available.
4) Store them at room temperature.
5) use the skin, juice and seeds whenever possible. These are the most nutritious parts.
I'll tell you food factoids in future blog posts.
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