Ever since the weather started to buck its ideas up, our plum tomatoes have been blushing and ripening. I am an enormous fan of these ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes, as they have such thick flesh. They are perfect for cooking as they do not shrink so much when heated, and are fat, big fruits.
I have been roasting these for twenty minutes at a time and adding to pasta dishes. And my word, they are superb. With a sprinkling of purple basil leaves, they taste incredible.
Some readers have been emailing me and asking what to do with green tomatoes left over from plants which were succumbing to blight. Unless you are a tremendous fan of green tomato chutney (which you may not be after two rainy summers of blight), the best thing to do is bring the fruits inside and place in the warmest room, where they will ripen. One of our plants snapped in two during a particularly ferocious gust of wind, so we have been ripening an entire crop of plum tomatoes in our kitchen. They don’t taste quite as incredible as those which have been ripening on the vine, but they don’t go to waste, which is the most important thing.
If your tomatoes are ripening happily on the plant, then leave them for a couple of days once they have reached their perfect colour. This means the flavours grow more concentrated. And on the day you harvest the fruits, don’t water the plant. This will concentrate sugars in the tomatoes.
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