Sowing The Seeds Of A Tasty Tomato Revival

20 Years Gone But Not Forgotten; Rutgers University's Prized "Ramapo" Is Coming Back

(AP)  The quest for the perfect tomato began in New Brunswick nearly 50 years ago and ended, for now, in a field south of Tel Aviv, Israel.

After eight years of taste tests from chefs and tomato lovers, agricultural scientists at Rutgers University say they have resurrected one of the most delicious Jersey tomatoes ever.

The elusive "Ramapo" tomato seed has been reproduced in Israel and 572,000 certified organic seeds were shipped this month to New Brunswick.

The Ramapo tomato, named after a New Jersey Indian tribe and developed at Rutgers in 1968, will be back for this summer's growing season after an absence of more 20 years.

In the Garden State, considered to produce some of the nation's best tomatoes, that's big news.

"People all across the land are frustrated with hard, cardboardy-tasting tomatoes," said Jack Rabin, associate director of the New Jersey agricultural experiment station at Rutgers. "Ramapo gives them something that's an alternative ... that captures that famous Jersey tomato taste."

Seed companies stopped producing the Ramapo decades ago because commercial farmers sought varieties that grew well in other regions, and the Ramapo did well mostly along the East Coast, Rabin said.

The first major release of more than 8,000 seed packets will be sold by Rutgers in a few weeks, initially to home gardeners like Edmund Ryan of Irasburg, Vt., who remembers first tasting the variety as a teenager from a neighbor in Red Bank.

"It was just the perfect Jersey tomato," said Ryan, 54, who recalled eating the tomatoes in a sandwich after football practice. "It's nice and tart and sweet but also just had a little extra that I can't explain."

Rutgers scientists have been busy pursuing that "holy grail" of productivity, good yield and taste in greenhouses and fields, experimenting with 154 varieties, with flavor as the most important characteristic.

Tomatoes have been an important crop in New Jersey for more than 100 years. Until the 1950s, many were grown for use in tomato products, including soup at the Campbell Soup Co., based in Camden, Rabin said.

After World War II, most of the large-scale commercial farms moved to warmer climates like Florida and California. What remains in New Jersey today are tomatoes for fresh use, at supermarkets, restaurants and farm stands.

In the 1960s, as transportation improved, breeders introduced new varieties to withstand the rigors of shipping from farm to supermarkets, often at the expense of flavor, Rabin said.

"These firm, shipping varieties that predominate today, even vine-ripened, they leave us wanting in terms of flavor," he said.

A new process also helped shipping: picking the tomatoes green and exposing them to ethylene gas to ripen and turn red to allow for longer transportation and shelf life, said Martha A. Mutschler, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell.

She said the problem in taste comes when the tomatoes are picked immature green, and they can't fully ripen.

"One reason tomatoes don't taste good is because they are picked too soon," she said. "Another reason is that people refrigerate them."

Of course, it's a matter of palate as well. Tomato lovers are passionate and often go without them during the winter, when in not season.

"The flavor is the most important thing, you know," said chef Andre Soltner, who sold his legendary New York restaurant, Lutece, and teaches at the French Culinary Institute in New York. "When I cannot get good tomatoes with flavor, I don't use them."

For Lucky Lee, co-owner of Lucky's Real Tomatoes in Brooklyn, N.Y., which trucks ripe tomatoes during the winter from Florida back to New York in a day's turnaround, good tomatoes are also a source of nostalgia.

"It reminds you of a different time, a more natural way of living before additives and chemicals were put in everything we eat to make it last longer," she said. "It's a simpler life, a nicer life."

The Ramapo tomato has elicited that nostalgia on tomato message boards from gardeners clamoring for the seeds.

It will grow well in New Jersey, but in other Mid-Atlantic states too, said its developer, Bernard Pollack. He started working on it in 1960 and is now a retired professor of plant breeding and genetics living in California.

Because the variety is an "F-1" hybrid, gardeners cannot save the seeds and replant them, expecting to recapture the same Ramapo with sweet-acid flavor.

Instead, seeds must be pollinated by hand, usually by a seed company which does the labor-intensive work of crossing the two parent lines, Pollack said. The original "parents" were still at Rutgers.

The "Jersey Tomato working group" at Rutgers, made up of economists, breeders, horticulturists and plant pathologists and first convened in 2000, will present its findings about the Ramapo Tuesday in Atlantic City.

Once they decided to introduce the Ramapo, they found a seed company in Israel, which has a winter growing season, to replicate them at a good price, Rabin said. They will be distributed to home gardeners and later to some commercial farmers to test them.

"As word gets out about the particular Ramapo tomato, there's going to be a huge demand for it across the country," said Paul Wigsten, farm liaison and produce buyer for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Wigsten has never tasted a Ramapo, but has heard about the lore.

"This will be a big day for tomato lovers. It's real gratifying to see Rutgers concentrating more on flavor than on any other characteristic of the tomato," he said.

[gabbysmomrs]

Oh how my mouth waters for a real tomato! I love true tomato flavor. I''m 64 and know what a real tomato tastes like. My grandchildren do not like tomatoes....who wants cardboard "tomatoes"? They have never had real ones.

I''ve discovered that Roma tomatoes are fairly good and the tiny "grape" tomatoes are much more flavorful, but I hope I''ll get to taste a tomato that tastes like a tomato. Who know? The entire generation that has not eaten real tomatoes may find they like them after all.

[jhilsua]

Tomato seeds purchasing info for those interested: http://www.njfarmfresh.rutgers.edu/JerseyTomato.html

[barbaraf4]

This can only be in improvement. I have loved and eaten tomatoes all my life, but in the past 5 years or so, they are simply tasteless.

[mailrick-2009]

Thank you tmittelstaed. Also, once again, the AP has shown that its writing and reporting continues to slide downhill (can''t they afford to hire educated and TRAINED journalists?) No link or info on where to purchase the seeds if you want to try them.

[tmittelstaed]

"Because the variety is an "F-1" hybrid, gardeners cannot save the seeds and replant them, expecting to recapture the same Ramapo with sweet-acid flavor."

This is simply false. There is at least 1 hobby tomato grower on gardenweb.com who has dehybridized Ramapo F1 and taken it to F6 and it''s remained stable. Many other people have also dehybridized other commercial hybrids. There is nothing magical about the process. In fact, the parent tomatoes that the Israeli seed grower is using to produce Ramapo F1 are themselves undoubtedly hybrids which have been dehybridized into open pollenation varieties.

I personally don''t have any problem with a University like Rutgers attempting to make some money back on R&D on a brand new, ORIGINAL plant variety. But I think it''s rather slimy when they take an older variety that was a stabilized homozygotous cultivar like Ramapo, and re-breed it into a hybrid then claim they "resurrected" the original variety. If anything, the only value they added in was making the tomato more palatable for commercial growers - by giving it a trait like a tough bruise-resistant skin, which has absolutely no value whatsoever to a home gardener.