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Heirloom Tomatoes
Flavor worth passing along. Lisa Jones of Dogwood Farm walks down the rows of...oh...23 varieties or so of heirloom
tomatoes, calling out names you'd never read in a Burpee catalog: German Stripe, White Tomesols, Peach Tomatoes,
Sun Sugars, Green Zebras, Italian Oxhearts. She delivers her fabulously flavored tomatoes to some of the best restaurants
in the area: The Inn at Easton, Chesapeake House, Sherwood's Landing at the Inn at Perry Cabin, and Tilghman Island
Inn, to name a few. Heirloom tomatoes, according to "How to Pick a Peach," by Russ Parsons, revolutionized the tomato industry about five or six years ago. The book chronicles how the movement to rediscover
the flavor and even the old-fashioned, odd shapes and colors of heirlooms, created shortcut paths from farmer to store and
farmer to restaurant — bypassing stays, and days, in distributor warehouses, to get them to market faster.
Today, the demand is nothing compared to number of acres spent on little round red tomatoes we use to
add color to our cheeseburgers. Parsons estimates that in California, fewer than 300 acres of heirloom tomatoes are grown,
compared to 30,000 acres of tomatoes total. But where chefs and consumers
are rabid for the product, the market will follow. And when you can find a real farm to supply the real deal, as we're
lucky to find more often around the Chesapeake area, this is a movement that's here and bound to grow.
Just recently, two of the chefs at the Crab Cookoff in St. Michaels included heirlooms in their recipes — the piquant flavor of the tomatoes, not to mention their brilliant colors, pairs perfectly with sweet crab. We were lucky enough (or begged hard enough) to get Mason's Chef Daniel Pochron's recipe for panzanella, a hearty Italian salad made with heirloom Sungold tomatoes (a sweet yellow cherry tomato), cukes and bread chunks: 1/2 C Euro-cukes, diced and seeds
removed 1/2 C Roasted peppers, skins removed and deseeded
1/4 C Red onion, diced 1/2 C Sungold tomatoes,
halved 1/4 C Ciabatta bread, Cubed 1/8 C Kalamata
olives, quartered 2 Tab Mint, chopped 2 Tab Basil,
lightly torn 2 Tab Italian parsley, chopped 1/3 C Red wine
vinegar 1/3 C Extra Virgin Olive Oil TT Kosher salt &
pepper |
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