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Food and drink: An attack of killer tomatoes

Tomato season is in full bloom – bet your mouth can’t wait

One big, fat, messy tradition occurs on the last Wednesday of every August when thousands of people gather in the little medieval town of Buñol in Spain for the biggest tomato war on earth. La Tomatina it’s called, and this year they threw six truckloads — maybe 100 tons — of juicy, red ripe tomatoes at each other. The town also hauled in 500 showers so everybody could clean up afterwards.

Lillooet cannot lay claim to such an outrageous tomato fest, but they do grow some pretty hot tomatoes there, and though town walls aren’t splattered with drippy red splotches this time of year, we’re still in the thick of the season, so to speak.

“Lillooet has a huge history of tomato growing. We used to have a big, big cannery that hired hundreds of people from all around. All the plateaus, including some of the reservations and so on, used to grow tomatoes,” says Leslie Malm, who helps her parents run Old Airport Garden in Lillooet.

“They would take the kids out of school in early September to pick tomatoes because they had so many and not enough labour to deal with them.”

Now the kids stay in school in early September. The cannery, which was started by Japanese families making a living in the area after the World War II internment camps closed, burnt down in the early 1960s. Local gossip had it that it was arson to force the canning production south to the States.

As for the plateaus lining the valley that once were festooned with tomato plants, it’s now pretty much come down to people growing them in their big backyards and at Old Airport Garden — the only commercial tomato-growing venture left.

But that doesn’t undermine the quality of the tomatoes. They’re still superb, due to the wonderful sunny climate (fewer than 80 days of precipitation annually) and the steadfast soil.

“We grow the best tomatoes in B.C.,” says Sumi Tanaka, who, along with her husband, Bill, have about 100 plants growing in their backyard. Leslie and her family grow good ones, too, she concedes good-naturedly, but the Tanakas just give theirs away.

Meanwhile, down at Old Airport Garden where they have four acres of tomato plants, people are driving in from 100 Mile House, from Vancouver, from Kamloops to get some red-hot tomatoes. Some pick them themselves, maybe 1,500 pounds. Another family, Italian, went for 3,000 pounds. That’s right — 3,000 pounds. I don’t have too many zeroes there.

“They make their own sauces to last them throughout the year,” says Leslie. I guess so.

So what are they looking for? For sauces it’s Romas, Romas, Romas. They have fleshier meat, fewer seeds and less liquid, so homemade sauce is nice and thick and flavourful.

For canning, it’s regular old field tomatoes or the beefsteaks. The big draw, though, is to just slice ’em and eat ’em.

“What people like about beefsteaks is they can take one slice and it covers the whole slice of bread,” says Leslie. Now that’s convenience food.

If you’re getting tomatoes for canning, which a lot of people are doing these days, look for ones that have that classic ripe-red colour. For canning it’s perfectly fine to go for ones with blemishes or what Leslie calls “cat face”, where the bottom of the tomato has a kind of scabby base. You’ll also get them for less.

But U-pick are cheapest of all: as low as 30 cents a pound at the Malms’ if you go for more than 500 pounds. Ah, come on, you’ve got a friend or neighbour you can share them with. But hurry — prime tomato time is almost up.

What you don’t want are ones with blossom end rot, which shows up as a black spot that looks spoiled at the bottom of the tomato. It’s due to a lack of calcium caused by inconsistent watering and can affect the inside of the tomato as well.

What else might you do with 3,000 pounds of tomatoes, besides possibly pasting your friends at a late Indian summer party?

“A lot of people freeze them whole because once you’ve got them frozen and you take them out of the freezer, the skin just slips right off of them,” says Leslie. A slick trick for recipes that require peeled tomatoes.

I think most people object to cooked tomato skins because of their texture — they roll up like little bits of thin plastic sheeting and are just as tough. Some people object to their taste, calling it unpleasant or bitter; others think the tomato skin, or at least the bit of flesh right under the skin, adds flavour. Decide for yourself, but if you want to remove the skin Leslie’s freezing trick is 10 times easier than the old “plunge them in boiling water” routine.

If you’re driving a ways to pick up a bunch for canning, you may want to go for the semi-ripes — orange ones with a blush of green. They’ll travel much better and will ripen up in a few days, and they’ll have just as much flavour as the vine-ripened red ones.

If you can’t make it to Lillooet, Leslie supplies North Arm Farm in Pemberton, plus she sells at Whistler Farmers’ Market (in front of Portobello), but usually only cherry tomatoes.

Which brings us to another tomato mother lode close at hand. Just along from Leslie’s booth, you’ll find Michael Allen and his wife Ana-Liza selling sumptuous organic heirloom tomatoes grown in their soil-based greenhouses in the Fraser Valley.

Not just another pretty tomato face, these babies have pizzazz. With some of the varieties dating back more than 100 years, heirloom tomatoes (or heritage tomatoes, if you’re from England) are hugely popular, partly for nostalgic reasons and partly because they taste and look so good and are loaded with healthy properties.

“I’m surprised at the number of young people who come out to buy our tomatoes by themselves without their parents,” says Michael, who used to play for the B.C. Lions before starting Garden Back to Eden. “They were losing something, and it’s like a lot of people are gripping it back.”

His heirloom favourites? Try the Black Pineapple from Belgium, with its big beefsteak-y form but a bright green outside and purple, pink and red stripes on the inside. It has a phenomenal look, and sweetness to match. The Moskovich delivers a more traditional, tangy tomato flavour, while the exotic Black Krim is like nothing you’ve ever tasted — a complex, smoky, hickory-like flavour “with a twang.”

Whether they’re from Lillooet or times past, any of these babies would be far too precious to toss, so La Tomatina at Whistler will just have to wait.

Check out Whistler Farmers’ Market every Sunday until Oct. 7.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-wining freelance writer who says “tomato.”