Orange Strawberry

Thursday, 10 September 2009 12:59

The fruits are extremely dense and heavy, and there's lots of them, so it's important to give the plants adequate support when the fruits start to swell. The peduncles are tough and fibrous, strong enough to hold the weight of the fruits, and take a bit of tugging at harvest time. One of the stand-out features of this variety is the silky smooth texture of its skin. At the unripe stage it looks almost waxy, and is delightful to touch. Fully ripe fruits lose some of the silkiness and become more like other tomatoes, but it is a nice feature while it lasts. You could probably pick an unripe fruit to use as a stress-reliever, so lovely it is to stroke. Sliced open, the inside of this tomato is almost solid flesh, with minimal locular tissue and very few seeds. The gel is confined to a few very thin seams just under the pericarp. This is a common attribute of oxheart tomatoes, which makes them excellent for cooking because their fleshiness makes for substantial sauces. By the same token they're slightly frustrating for seed savers, because the seeds are few and far between and the tiny pockets of gel are difficult to locate within the mass of fleshy fruit. It's a bit odd really when a tomato the size of a large fist yields little more than a dozen seeds. The flavour is strong, rich and savoury. This, like other fleshy types, comes into its own as a cooking tomato. Especially nice if you fancy a bright orange sauce. The flesh is crispy when raw, and cooking turns it into something grainy but soft, like the flesh of a peach. The cooked flavour has a nice balance between sweet and savoury, with a hint of fruityness thrown in. It certainly has plenty of flavour, far more so than most 'paste' tomatoes. 80 days. Indeterminate. Yellow-Orange. Mid-Season. Heirloom Go to table of tomato varietes