
Consider using a tough pair of scissors or garden shears to keep a bit of the stem attached. Hold off on watering and wait for a nice, sunny day to get picking, says Michetti. They’ll ripen just fine indoors, Michetti says. Once the daytime highs aren’t better than about 15 C, tomatoes aren’t growing much more anyway. “So now you're dealing with wet tomatoes, which is not fun because you're laying all those blankets out on your living room floor and putting all your tomatoes on them for a couple of days to dry.” “So often it happens that when the bad weather comes, it comes quickly, and often there's rain or sleet that day,” says Michetti, speaking from experience. It just freezes right through.” Uncover during the day so plants can soak up the last of the season’s sunshine. If frost is imminent, cover tomatoes with old blankets, sheets or burlap, says Michetti.
#Misshapen tomatoes how to#
Here, Michetti explains how to realize all of these benefits and more, and enjoy the fruits of your labours without the task feeling terribly laborious. And then there’s always burgers or sandwiches that are incomplete without a nice slice of, say, fresh Super Fantastic. They’re great for marinades, for example, because the acidity helps to break down collagen in meats in stews and vegetable fibres in stocks. They’re essential to pasta and pizza sauce, of course, but tomatoes are also foundational to myriad aspects of food prep, says Michetti.


#Misshapen tomatoes professional#
“But also, as a professional chef, tomatoes are a pretty important item in the kitchen. “ something we have been growing and eating and cooking my whole life with my family,” he says. He grows about 15 plants and usually four varieties each year, including the meaty Super Fantastic, the early producing Manitoba, a cherry such as the heirloom Tiny Tim, and the Italian roma variety, San Marzano – “the king of sauce,” says Michetti, reverently.

How do we race against the frost to reap all that we’ve sown? Then, once the reaping is done, what do we do with it all?īut for Perry Michetti (Cooking ’90), Culinary Arts and professional food studies department head, this is always a happy time of year. Come late summer and early fall, though, when the fruit weighs heavy on the vine, that hope might turn to anxiety. How to pick, store, stew and serve up some surprisesĮach spring, gardeners plant tomato seedlings or seeds with a sense of hope and expectation.
