Somehow after all these years someone is well on the road to fixing
the flavor problem with tomatoes.
A favorite summer fruit for farm kids is to go pick a ripe tomato and
cut it open and sprinkle either salt or a little sugar on the cut
surface and eat it just as is. This is hardly worth it with the
supermarket produce that is already a couple of days picked or
ripened indoors anyways.
It is one of the reasons everyone grows tomatoes in their back yard
no matter how cheap the product in the stores.
The apparent complexity involved here is amazing but somehow we knew
that anyway. Other produce have a bit of this immediacy but none are
so pronounced as the tomato. Let us hope that it is soon. All I
want is a fresh sun-ripened beefsteak in the hot august sun.
The secret to good
tomato chemistry
by Staff Writers
Los Angeles CA (SPX) May 28, 2012
A sophisticated
statistical analysis of the chemistry and taste test results showed
that flavor intensity traces to 12 different compounds and sweetness
to another 12, including 8 that were also important for overall
flavor.
There is nothing
better than a ripe, red, homegrown tomato, and now researchers
reporting online in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have
figured out just what it is that makes some of them so awfully good
(and your average supermarket tomato so bland). "We now know
exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato," said Harry
Klee of the University of Florida.
Tomato flavor depends
on sugars, acids, and a host of less well-defined aroma volatiles (so
named for the ease with which they vaporize, sending scent molecules
into the air). Klee's team set out to define the chemicals that are
most important to our fondness for one particular tomato or another.
First, they assembled
chemical profiles of 278 tomato samples representing152
heirloomvarieties, most of which were bred before the ubiquitous
commercial tomatoes of today even existed. That effort turned up an
unexpectedly large chemical diversity within the heirloom
tomatoes-with variation in some volatile contents of as much as
3,000-fold across cultivars.
That diversity
presented the researchers with an opportunity to really explore what
makes consumers favor one tomato over another. They did a series of
taste tests with a consumer panel using a subset of those heirlooms
that represented the most chemical diversity.
Panelists rated their
overall liking of each variety as well as the overall tomato flavor
intensity, sweetness, and sourness. Panelists also rated supermarket
tomatoes in the same way.
A sophisticated
statistical analysis of the chemistry and taste test results showed
that flavor intensity traces to 12 different compounds and
sweetness to another 12, including 8 that were also important for
overall flavor.
The researchers also
found that some flavor volatiles influence the perception of
sweetness through our sense of smell. "In other words,"
Klee says, "there are volatile chemicals unrelated to sugars
that make things taste sweeter."
That raises the
tantalizing possibility that this feature might be played up in
tomatoes and other foods to make us experience no-calorie sweetness
through our noses instead of our tongues.
The analysis also
showed that some of the volatiles most abundantly present in tomatoes
offer little in terms of our enjoyment of them in comparison to other
and much more rare ingredients bring good flavor in commercial
tomatoes," Klee says, and that could go a long way.
"Consumers care
deeply about tomatoes," he says. "Their lack of flavor is a
major focus of consumer dissatisfaction with modern agriculture. One
could do worse than to be known as the person who helped fix flavor."
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