- Author: Diane Nelson
People often complain about grocery store tomatoes, saying they’re too hard and don’t have the flavor we remember from the days of old. And we thought we knew why - because the millions of tons of tomatoes harvested in the United States and beyond have to be picked before they’re fully ripe and juicy in order to survive being shipped long distances. What’s more, many shoppers store their tomatoes in the fridge, which destroys both their flavor and texture.
But guess what? It’s not just how tomatoes are grown, harvested and stored that affect their flavor. A research team led by Ann Powell, a biochemist in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has discovered a gene mutation that diminishes a...
- Author: Pamela M. Geisel
Tomatoes are the No. 1 garden crop in America. Everyone who has a summer garden grow tomatoes. There are more blogs, forums, tweets, and garden club and café talks about tomatoes than any other garden vegetable. Tomatoes are used in so many recipes, and can be preserved so easily into so many products it just makes sense to grow them in your garden. The garden lore about growing tomatoes successfully abounds. And the really good new . . . the failure rate for tomatoes is pretty darn low. You may not get as many as you like but you will get some pretty much guaranteed even with the low yielding heirloom varieties.
The really hard part about growing tomatoes is trying to select the variety for your location, the preferred size of...
- Author: Jim Coats
A wise man once said that God made weather so farmers would have something to complain about. Or maybe he was just a wise-acre.
One very wet spring a few years ago I was talking with another wise man, the late UC plant pathologist Joe Ogawa. I told him that the fruit trees must be enjoying the rainy weather. Joe's response: "Oh, the trees are probably enjoying it—but the fungi are so excited they're jumping up and down!"
I was working that spring with Joe and his colleague Harley English on their book, Diseases of Temperate Zone Tree Fruit and Nut Crops. Sure enough, our meetings were often interrupted by phone calls from farm...
- Author: Colin Bishop
Workers sort tomatoes at Russell Ranch
Part of our mission at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis is to ensure access to healthy food. So we’ve focused much of our work on the intersection between agriculture and human nutrition.
An interesting new field of study in this area looks at flavonoids, which are compounds in fruits and vegetables thought to have beneficial antioxidant effects and other medicinal value – they may even help reduce cancer risk.
Measuring the amount of flavonoids is one way we can figure out just how...
- Author: Ann King Filmer
Home cooks know the secret to peeling tomatoes is a quick dip in hot water to loosen the skins. It takes a lot of water (and heating energy) to peel three million pounds of processing tomatoes in California each year. New UC Davis research is fine-tuning a novel way of peeling all those tomatoes with almost no water — using infrared heat.
Two methods are used to remove skins in processed tomatoes — a hot water/lye dip, or steam. The dip method uses a lot of water, a lot of energy, and creates a lot of salts . . . which presents its own disposal problem. Steam treatment heats too much of the tomato, resulting in reduced yield and quality.
“The...
