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Comment by charlesdm | Hacker News Reader

As a Belgian, I'd happily pay x4 to x5 the price of the average tomato you can buy in the supermarket here. But I can't. There's an 80% chance tomatoes are tasteless, and a 20% chance they're amazing. I want amazing tomatoes, every single time. :(

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You can learn how to tell them apart if you want. Stepdad was a greengrocer so to me this is second nature but when looking for tomatoes take the smaller ones and the darker ones. They're most likely to be the ones that taste better, even when you pick them from a batch. People instinctively seem to go for the brighter and larger fruits but those are almost always the bland ones.

In my experience smell is the best indicator. You want your fruit to smell like fruit. If it has no smell it doesn't have any flavor either.

Smell and taste are so intricately related that loss of the sense of smell usually translates into a significant loss of the sense of taste so you are absolutely right. But smelling the produce before buying is considered pretty bad form where I live.

I find this really interesting, where in the world would it be considered bad form to sniff a tomatoe before purchasing?

Well, here in NL it certainly would if you went through a crate of tomatoes at the local supermarket and smelled all of them one-by-one.

You've got two nostrils, so sniff them two at time and take half as long.

That got me laughing but being the serious kind I am now wondering if we're wired up in such a way that if one tomato is bland and the other is rich in smell that we can tell the two apart reliably enough to know which is which?

I always think of us as having two eyes, two ears for stereo vision and sound but never think of us as having 'two noses' to determine the direction of a small or two different smells at the same time.

I live in Amsterdam but I always try how strawberries smell before buying. And in my experience they smell the same if they come from true same batch so I only need to try once.

> But smelling the produce before buying is considered pretty bad form where I live.

Doing that in supermarkets here is also looked upon as a bit weird. But I don't care, I prefer to look weird and eat the best tomatoes ;)

The tomatoes themselves don't have a strong smell, though the vines do.

Thanks -- going to put this to the test next time I go shopping!

It's a bit more work and other people might get annoyed with you for rejecting 80% of the produce but it is worth it. Good luck!

Buy this type of cherry tomato, they're nice and still relatively affordable: http://rooi.versuit.nl/media/catalog/product/cache/6/image/9...

They won't beat summer sun grown tomatoes in warmer climates, but they're available all year round.

A bit of sugar and a bit of acidity can boost the flavor of sub-par tomatoes, for example for a sauce.

My favourites, I eat tons of them, from Albert Heijn (common Dutch supermarket). But they're better in the summer, if I'm not wrong.

The Albert Heijn Song

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2yno1z

Refrigerating tomatoes kills the flavor and the nutrients, so like all fruits and vegetables they are best consumed 'in season'.

Albert Heijn tomatoes are terrible. Actually most of the fruit in AH is terrible. Ironically it's also the most expensive.

AH Tasty Tom are pretty decent too.

Tasty Tom is very nice, but they are 2.5x more expensive than these.

Two suggestions:

- smell them. Smell is part of flavor and also correlates with the other parts of flavor. Odorless tomatoes are 90% of the time tasteless

- choose tomatoes which are still attached to a part of the plant when possible. They keep their flavor a bit longer.

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