Gardeners know the absolute joy of tasting a homegrown tomato, bitten into, right off the vine. It’s why so many of us turn our noses up at those tasteless things in the grocery store. The sweetness, tang and aroma can’t be beat. It truly is summer in a bite.
However, if you take that same perfect tomato, pop it in the refrigerator to keep it fresh and then taste it again the next day, you’ll notice something different.
Where the flavor was bursting with sugars and tangy tomato goodness, now everything is muted, and the texture is weird.
This phenomenon is not just in your head. Gardeners everywhere have picked up on this. Despite being told by friends and relatives that we were being eccentric, science backs us up on this. Refrigerating tomatoes completely changes their flavor and texture on a cellular and chemical level.
What Makes a Tomato Taste Like a Tomato?
A lot goes into making tomatoes taste the way they do. Like many other fruits, their flavor is a complex mix of sugars, acids and volatile compounds. It’s these VCs – tiny, airborne molecules – that our noses pick up on and give food its aroma. The volatile compounds are at the heart of what gives a tomato its flavor.
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