The Sungold also rises: America's great tomato debate

Business Times

4 days ago

THERE is a small sandwich – three bites, give or take – available as an add-on to the four-course, US$85 tasting menu at River Twice, a contemporary American restaurant in Philadelphia.
To make it, chef-owner Randy Rucker toasts two sourdough brioche slices, then adds a thin layer of applewood-smoked mayonnaise and a crispy sheet of the Korean seaweed gamtae. At its heart is a thick slab of heirloom tomato, lightly seasoned with sea salt from Delaware.
Even though it's loaded with more than US$50 worth of caviar, Rucker calls it 'the tomato sandwich'.
How is it that such a sandwich is not named for its flashiest ingredient? That, Rucker says, is the star power of the perfect summer tomato. Juicy, sweet, acidic, savoury – biting into one can feel like ingesting an entire season in a mouthful.
Let there be no doubt, 'this is a tomato sandwich with caviar, not a caviar sandwich with tomato', he says.
Great heirloom tomatoes inspire obsession among chefs for their fleeting natures, colourful backstories and range of flavours. PHOTO: AFP
Great heirloom tomatoes have a way of demanding the spotlight, and not just on the plate. These divas inspire obsession among chefs for their fleeting natures, colourful backstories and range of flavours. But because they're bred for flavour above all else, they're divas on the farm too: finicky to grow, less resistant to disease and more likely to crack or bruise in transport.
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For all of that trouble and taste, they command a premium price. This year's early arrivals at one of New York's top tomato destinations, the Norwich Meadows Farm stand at the Union Square Greenmarket, retailed for nearly US$9 a pound.
A single, large specimen could cost more than US$20, a price that can leave some customers sputtering, according to owner Zaid Kurdieh. Others, he says, 'don't bat an eye'.
Even if imported tomatoes were free – and they're not, especially since commodity tomatoes from Mexico are now subject to a 17 per cent tariff – they're no substitute for the locally grown, unique varieties chefs crave.
Commodity tomatoes from Mexico, such as the kidney tomato (pictured), are subject to a 17 per cent tariff in the US. PHOTO: AFP
'Everybody has to be a step ahead,' says Brant Shapiro, the director of sales and marketing for Norwich Meadows Farm. For some chefs, he adds, only the smoky-sweet taste and dusky red, verging-into-black colouring of a Paul Robeson tomato (a Russian variety named for the singer and political activist) will do. 'It's something more special on the menu.'
Rare breeds
Sometimes the best way to stay ahead in the summer tomato arms race is to grow your own variety.
At Blackberry Farm, a rural retreat in Walland, Tennessee, stays begin at US$1,545 per night, including meals. Cassidee Dabney, executive chef at the property's The Barn restaurant, takes particular pride in the Hazel Scott tomatoes grown a two-minute walk from the kitchen. Consider it a destination tomato. You're unlikely to find it anywhere else.
The variety came to Dabney's attention in 2013 when a neighbour (Hazel, from Scott, Arkansas, hence the name) gave a bag of her family's breed to the chef's parents.
On the outside, it was round and red: a tomato emoji personified. But on the inside, 'it had next to no seeds in it', Dabney says. 'It was the most bizarre-looking tomato ever,' she recalls. The taste was the perfect blend of sweet and acid, 'meaty and versatile'.
While the tomato is perfectly at home between slices of soft white bread with a slathering of Duke's mayonnaise, Dabney makes it the focal point of a salad with Jimmy Nardello peppers, hibiscus, blue grits, along with pickled onions and buttermilk aioli, both of which are smoked.
A cut above
It's often said that a great tomato needs little more than slicing and salting. There's more to it than that, says Dan Richer, chef-owner of Razza in Jersey City, where summer means margarita pizzas made with freshly milled tomatoes. 'The texture that the tomatoes have because they haven't been previously cooked is ethereal,' Richer says.
Also at Razza is a salad that inspires Richer to get almost philosophical about tomato butchery. 'The way I cut a brandywine tomato is completely different from the way I cut a green zebra tomato. We have to look at that individual tomato and say, 'Where should we cut this tomato so that it retains its sense of self?''
Another chef focused on a tomato's path to self-actualisation through sympathetic slicing is Michael Anthony.
Over his nearly two decades at Gramercy Tavern, he's become a seminal figure in New York's market-driven dining scene; now he's also chef-partner for dining at the Waldorf Astoria New York. 'Some dishes are amazing when the tomatoes are cut paper-thin and just barely perceptible on your tongue, and others are just great when you can barely fit in your mouth in one bite,' he says.
The meaty heirloom tomato slices that adorn the lunchtime BLT at Lex Yard are necessarily closer to the latter category.
For the 'B', Anthony uses intensely smoky, salty Benton's bacon. 'The bacon can almost steal the show,' he says about his sandwich, which also includes crisp gem lettuce, spicy aioli and house-baked Italian sourdough. 'You need a thick, juicy tomato to live up to it.'
Heir to the heirloom
Beloved as heirloom tomatoes are, their uncontested lock on chef ardour 'has kind of peaked', observes Norwich's Kurdieh. Not because they've grown boring, but because 'now there are people out there breeding, taking heirlooms and crossing them to come up with better stuff', he says.
'There's tons of breeders out there that are just going nuts with the next new tomato.'
Top among them is the Tokita Seed Company of Saitama, Japan, whose sweet, deeply flavoured orange-yellow Sungold cherry tomatoes have inspired devotion, even from the hardcore heirloom set. 'I never have enough Sungolds,' Kurdieh says. 'It's crazy. I double, and triple (plantings), and I still don't have enough.'
The devotion runs deep. Chef Michael King made Sungold the name of his restaurant in the Arlo Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and features the varietal throughout the menu, notably as the sauce for his signature bucatini dish. Meanwhile, at Cafe Mado, across Brooklyn in Prospect Heights, Sungolds shine when they're cooked on a blisteringly hot charcoal grill before being tossed with arbol chilli, garlic vinegar and chives.
Tokita's other breeds are making inroads too. Kurdieh's nominee for the 'next new tomato' is the golf ball-size Sunpeach variety, which he thinks has a more pronounced tomato flavour, compared to the Sungold's tropical fruit notes. At Elements, in Princeton, New Jersey, Sunpeach tomatoes are treated like meat, getting slowly smoked, and glazed in a Kansas City-style barbecue sauce as part of an all-tomato course on the vegetarian tasting menu.
Chef Sam Lawrence, of Bridges in New York's Chinatown, emphasises the Sunpeach's more delicate aspects, serving them peeled, glistening and jewel-like on the restaurant's cult-favourite comte tart, and letting their innate flavour shine through.
'Peak season tomatoes means using the right one at the right time for the right thing,' he says. And sometimes, that right thing is dessert.
That's where the folks at Caffe Panna, a mini chain of Italian-inspired ice cream and coffee shops started by Halle Meyer, see an opportunity for Sungolds. For one week a year, die-hard fans line up for ice cream sundaes topped with tomatoes, olive oil and saba, a concentrated grape must.
Later in the summer, yellow heirlooms will get their time in the spotlight, appearing as a granita. What could be sweeter? BLOOMBERG