Every Way to Cut a Tomato

If you are to believe those old Ginsu knife commercials, cutting a tomato is the ultimate test of the sharpness of a knife. This is not completely inaccurate. A really ripe beefsteak tomato is like a water balloon. More accurately, it’s like millions of tiny water balloons that are all taped together. (And even more accurately, it’s like millions of individual plant cells bound together by the carbohydrate glue pectin.)

The thing is, in a ripe tomato, those balloons are really full, and really delicate, which means that even the slightest pressure can rupture them, bruising the tomato and leaking its precious fluids out onto the cutting board (or worse, in the shopping bag) before it can even reach your plate.

So before we even get to the steps in the video, the real key to cutting a tomato is having the right kind of knife, and that means a sharp one. I prefer a good chef’s knife or santoku, but any sharp knife that feels comfortable for you is will work.

(You can find my video on sharpening knives here.)

Buying Tomatoes

At the supermarket, smaller tomatoes taste better. Here’s why.

The very best tomatoes are the ones you get at the height of tomato season, fresh from the farmer’s market. Strike that. The very best tomatoes are the ones you get at the height of tomato season, fresh from the vine in your back yard. Strike that. The very vest tomatoes are the ones you get fresh from the vines in your backyard, still warm from the sun, sliced and eaten immediately with nothing but a pinch of salt to bring out their flavor.

That said, most of us don’t have access to sun-kissed tomatoes year round. So what to do?

The problem with tomatoes is that when perfectly ripe, they are delicate, which makes shipping over long distances near-impossible without causing damage to then. Because of this, most large tomatoes are picked from the vine while still firm and green and do the bulk of their ripening off the vine during transit. This type of ripening, controlled by ethylene gas (a gas produced naturally by ripening fruits that can be artificially applied to trigger ripening), will make tomatoes look ripe, but they won’t taste ripe. A tomato ripened off the vine never has the same flavor or sweetness as one allowed to ripen fully on the vine.

What’s the solution for a tomato lover in winter? Look for smaller tomatoes. Smaller tomatoes are less likely to crush themselves under their own weight during shipping and can thus be picked when closer to fully ripe.

Storing Tomatoes

There are three things that are the enemy of tomato storage: moisture loss, cold, and over ripening.

Let’s deal with the easy one first: moisture loss. Tomatoes lose their moisture from the stem end and as time goes on, they will start to lose weight and shrivel due to evaporation. To test this, I stored batches of tomatoes three different ways: stem-end-up, stem-end-down against a flat tray, and stem-end-up but with a small piece of tape placed over the spot where the stem used to be in order to hinder moisture loss. The tomatoes stored stem-end-up started to wrinkle within a couple days, while those stored with the stem end covered by tape or stored with the stem-end-down stayed plump for a week.

Store your tomatoes with the stem removed, facing down.

Should I Refrigerate Tomatoes?

You’ve heard it a million times: don’t store tomatoes in the refrigerator.

Not so fast. While the advice is generally good—both tomato texture and flavor will get permanently and adversely affected by even brief refrigeration—there are times when it makes sense to refrigerate.

Several years ago, my colleague from Serious Eats Daniel Gritzer and I did a series of blind taste tests with tomatoes stored various ways. We found that while storing tomatoes in the fridge made a noticeable and negative difference in their flavor and texture, the loss in flavor and texture caused by over-ripening was often worse than the damage done by the fridge, especially in tomatoes that were already ripe.

Moreover, if you’re buying tomatoes from the supermarket, odds are that they’ve already been refrigerated somewhere down the line, so additional refrigeration won’t further harm them.

Bottom line: if you have ripe tomatoes, the best thing to do is eat them while they are ripe before they have a chance to over-ripen or spoil. If you can’t eat them right away, refrigerate them and just make sure you give them ample time to return to room temperature before eating.