Picked green and rock-hard, unripe tomatoes are loaded into trucks and taken to storage facilities where they are gassed. (Ethylene gas is what makes a tomato turn red.) Tomatoes naturally produce their own ethylene gas and slowly redden as they ripen at their own pace, which takes time. Many companies lock immature green tomatoes in an ethylene-filled chamber to speed up ripening, but this merely forces them to turn red, not ripe. They never even get the chance to develop flavor.
Fresh Tomatoes at The Chef’s Garden
At The Chef’s Garden, every one of our 42 diverse tomato varieties is ripened in the field “in full accord with nature,” as we like to say. And they don’t grow in low-quality sand or water. Ours luxuriate in soft, fertile, nutrient-rich soil (we know because we test it regularly). When you order them, we package them as carefully as if they were fine china.
Of course, we grow red tomatoes. But we also grow yellow, orange, pearly white, and the deepest eggplant purple. Our “dragon eye” tomato is red with yellow flame-like striations licking its sides. “Kaleidoscope jewel” and “cosmic eclipse” are both awash in swirls of color like the aurora borealis.
And, when our tomatoes are green, they are meant to be. “Green zebra” resembles a watermelon ─ pale green with dark green mottled stripes. Green, red, purple, and orange “bumble bees” are sturdy little elongated bodies with distinctive contrasting stripes.
As for size and shape, our tiniest “currant tomatoes” are clusters of pea-sized fruit similar to champagne grapes. Our largest, the “baby beef,” is a nice big slicing tomato. Other varieties are shaped like teardrops, pears, or olives. All are available singly or in mixes.
And flavor? We’ve got you covered there, too ─ … try as we might, written descriptions of our farm-fresh tomatoes can only get us so far. With so many mixes of so many options, why not explore them for yourself?
It’s no mistake that one of our tomato mixes is called “Toy Box.” That’s because we want our tomatoes to inspire chefs to play and experiment with the endless potential of our delightfully flavorful, fresh tomatoes. The most imaginative kid in the world will quickly grow bored with a toy box full of identical toys. So will an imaginative chef. And boredom has no place in the kitchen.
Explore The Chef’s Garden’s world of tomatoes. It will take much more than a minute because it is a big, wide world.
We grow. You play.