Why Store Bought Tomatoes Have No Flavor

Heirloom tomatoes

Did you know: tomatoes are not Italian.

Italy had none before Columbus. No marinara, no pizza sauce, no pomodoro. The first surviving tomato sauce recipe was written by Antonio Latini in Naples in 1692, nearly 150 years after the plant showed up, and he called it salsa alla spagnuola. Sauce in the Spanish style.

It took Europe about two centuries to stop being afraid of them. Tomatoes are nightshades, related to mandrake and deadly nightshade, and in 1597 John Gerard’s Herball described them as being “of ranke and stinking savour.” That reputation took 200 years to shake.

He was wrong. But something did go wrong with the tomato eventually, and it happened a lot more recently than 1597.

You already know something is off

You have known it every February when you slice into something red and firm and perfect looking and it tastes like wet paper. Then August comes, somebody hands you one still warm off the vine, and it is a completely different food.

That gap is not nostalgia. Two specific things happened, and both are documented.

We bred the sugar out on purpose

For decades growers selected tomatoes for even red color. No green shoulders, no shading near the stem, uniform from top to bottom. It looks better in a display case and it grades better at the packing house.

In 2012, a study in Science worked out what that selection actually did. The mutation that produces that perfect even color switches off a gene called GLK2, and GLK2 is what builds the chloroplasts in the fruit.

Those green shoulders everybody bred away were the sugar factory. The chloroplasts in the unripe fruit are where the plant makes the sugars that end up in the tomato you eat. Turn them off and you get a prettier tomato with less sugar in it, permanently. That is not a farming problem or a shipping problem. It is written into the genetics of most commercial varieties.

Then the refrigerator finished the job

Below 55 degrees a tomato stops producing its aroma compounds. And here is the part that matters: putting it back on the counter does not bring them back. The damage is done.

So a tomato that gets picked green, gassed with ethylene to turn it red, trucked cold and held cold at the store has had its flavor shut off twice before you ever see it. Ethylene only makes it red. It never makes it sweet.

About 60 percent of tomatoes sold in the United States come from Mexico or Canada. In 2025 that was 4.4 billion pounds from Mexico alone, plus another 510 million from Canada. Those greenhouse plants are grown on a nutrient solution tuned for kilograms per square meter and selected for yield, uniformity and shelf life. Flavor is not on the list, because nothing in that supply chain pays for it.

Never put a good tomato in the refrigerator. That is the single most useful sentence in this post.

Pick the tomato for the job

There are around 10,000 varieties worldwide in 13 shapes and 6 colors. You do not need all of them. You need three.

Slicers and beefsteaks. Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Mortgage Lifter, Green Zebra. Sugar and acid together, high water content, and a slice big enough to cover a piece of bread.

This is your BLT tomato. It is your tomato and mayonnaise sandwich on soft white bread, salt and pepper, eaten standing over the sink because it is going to drip and you know it. It is thick slices with flaky salt and olive oil, caprese with fresh mozzarella and basil, a burger, a tomato sandwich that needs nothing else on it. Anywhere the tomato is the point and it is not going near heat.

Do not cook a beefsteak. All that water has to go somewhere and it will turn your sauce thin.

Caprese salad

Paste and plum. Roma, San Marzano, Amish Paste, Opalka. Low water, dense flesh, few seeds. This is your canning, drying and long simmered sauce tomato. There is a reason it looks different.

Roma tomatoes

Cherry and grape. Sungold, Sweet 100, Juliet. The most sugar in the least water of anything in the garden. They make the best fast sauce there is, and most people never try it because they think of them as salad tomatoes.

Grape tomatoes

The fastest good sauce you will make all year

It is a ratio, not a recipe. Weigh the tomatoes and everything else follows.

Small tomatoes 100 percent · olive oil 10 percent · sliced garlic 2 percent · salt 1 percent · torn basil off the heat.

For 2 pounds of cherry tomatoes that is 6 tablespoons of oil, about 4 cloves of garlic and a teaspoon and a half of salt.

Oil goes in the cold pan first. Bring it up until it is screaming hot, then add the tomatoes. Let them sit and blister hard, do not stir them politely. When the skins split and char, smash them. The tomatoes throw enough of their own liquid to deglaze the pan, so you do not need to add water and you should not. Add the garlic, let it go a moment, then pull it off the heat and finish with torn basil.

Serve it immediately, over fresh pasta or on a slice of good sourdough. Total time is about the same as boiling the pasta.

Stretching August into January without buying any equipment

Freeze them whole. Core them, freeze on a tray, bag them. Do not blanch. Months later run one under warm water and the skin slips right off in your hand.

Roast and freeze flat. 300 degrees until they collapse and concentrate. Let them cool completely before they go in the bag, because packing hot food into a freezer bag traps steam, throws ice crystals through everything, and drops the temperature of whatever is sitting next to it. Cool first, then flat, then frozen.

Make tomato powder. This is the one nobody expects and everybody ends up loving. Forty pounds of tomatoes becomes a jar you can hold in one hand, and it is shelf stable with no freezer space at all.

Slice them thin, about a quarter inch, and lay them in a single layer without overlapping. In a dehydrator, 135 degrees until they are completely brittle. In an oven, the lowest setting your oven will hold with the door propped open a crack so moisture can escape.

The doneness test is the whole thing: they have to snap, not bend. Any flex at all means there is still moisture in there and your powder will clump and eventually spoil. Let them cool completely, then grind in a spice grinder or a good blender.

Into soup, into bread dough, into spice rubs, onto popcorn. Add water and you have paste.

If you can them, one rule

Acid in every single jar. Two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice per quart, or half a teaspoon of citric acid. Bottled, never fresh, because fresh lemons vary in acidity and bottled is standardized.

And then follow a tested recipe exactly. Not a recipe off a blog, not your neighbor’s memory, not a scaled up version of something that worked once. A tested recipe means one that has been through actual laboratory validation for time, temperature and acidity: the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, the Ball Blue Book, or your county extension office.

We tell you to trust your instincts on almost everything we teach. This is the exception. Canning is the one place in cooking where improvising can genuinely hurt someone, and the tested recipe is not a suggestion.

Go get a good one

Off your own vine if you have one. If you do not, go find a local farmer. Farmers markets, farm stands, the neighbor with more than they can eat. Any of it beats the case at the grocery store, and the season does not last.

—Chef Keegan and The Lakehouse Bakery Team