Tomato Roma Each

The tomato that serious home cooks reach for when it matters. Where a round tomato is juicy and fresh eating, the Roma is built for cooking. Meaty, low moisture flesh with fewer seeds and a concentrated flavour that deepens and sweetens as it cooks down. It is the tomato that makes a genuinely great pasta sauce, a rich slow braise or a tray of roasted tomatoes worth the effort.

At its best in the warmer months from November through April when Australian grown Romas come in deeply coloured and full of flavour. Warm growing conditions concentrate the sugars in a way that cooler months simply cannot match. Available year-round but summer and early autumn is your window for the best Roma tomato going.

Simmer slowly into a pasta sauce that tastes like it cooked all day, halve and roast in a low oven with olive oil, garlic and thyme until collapsed and intensely sweet, layer through a lasagne, or use as the base of a shakshuka where the flesh holds its shape beautifully through the cooking process. It rewards low and slow cooking above everything else.

The best buying tip for any tomato is the simplest one. Smell it at the stem end. A tomato that smells like a tomato is a good tomato. One that smells of nothing will taste of nothing regardless of how it looks on the outside. Look for deep red colour right to the shoulders, a slight give under gentle pressure and that fresh tomato fragrance at the stem. That is your signal every time.