My chef friend is arguing with me and IMO she is just straight up fucking wrong. Cooking tomatoes to death during the canning process isn't going to do any favors for the texture or flavor. Every canned diced tomato i've had has been gross (and the dice is always too big and ugly)

I think she's 100% confusing a comparison between QUALITY canned tomatoes i.e. real san marzano tomatoes versus shitty greenhouse grown tomatoes but she's insisting that no actually canned tomatoes are just better

I just want to get a consensus but i'm going to continue to disagree with anyone else who is wrong about this

  • LaughingLion [any, any]
    ·
    16 days ago

    your chef friend is right and shes not talking about diced tomatoes she probably means the steamed whole ones

    they wont send the ripe ones to market because they will take too long in transit so they send the unripe ones because they will ripen during that time of transit and storage and also they get frozen and unfrozen

    the canned ones get flash steamed or whatever, have some salt added to preserve them and are ripe right there in the can. they are generally much more flavorful for cooking with

    if you know someone growing heirlooms those are the best option for fresh if you can get them off the vine they will blow the socks off any store tomato

    • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
      ·
      16 days ago

      Yep.

      I'm a fussy arsehole about tomatoes and in general tomatoes at the market are crap cultivars that were picked underripe. Canned typically has more flavour.

      Not true for all brands, some canning companies are buying the ones nobody else wanted, some times of year the ones on the shelf are actually good, sometimes your local coop has tomatoes a cool person picked yesterday afternoon.

      In general the most popular cultivars of tomatoes are garbage and bland. They are grown for pest tolerance, shelf appearance, and ease of harvesting. Roma is often better at doing the same things in a dish with more flavour.

    • AmericaDelendaEst [comrade/them]
      ·
      16 days ago

      the diced ones are the ones I hate using and this whole argument, which you are all wrong about btw I don't care, is because the sous chef is like "stop using cherry tomatoes use the canned diced ones" and it's like ughhh it's gonna make some of my dishes taste worse and uglierrrrrr

      • LaughingLion [any, any]
        ·
        16 days ago

        its okay we can all have our lib moment where we say "everyone thinks im wrong about the thing..... no, it must be all of them who are wrong"